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THE REALISM OF JESUS 
J. ALEXANDER FINDLAY 


THE 
REALISM OF JESUS 


A Paraphrase and Exposition of ihe ! 


Sermon on the Mount 
BY 


J. ALEXANDER FINDLAY 
Didsbury College, Manchester 


NEW os YORK 


GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


THE REALISM OF JESUS. I 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


NOTE BY THE AUTHOR 


THE paraphrase of the three chapters of the First 
Gospel containing the “Sermon on the Mount” appeared 
as one of a series of “Fellowship Manuals” published 
by the “Epworth Press.”’ My thanks are due both to the 
“Epworth Press” and to the editors of the series of 
“Fellowship Manuals” for their kind permission to in- 
clude the paraphrase in this volume. Its object is not to 
take the place of any ancient or modern translation of 
the “Sermon,” but to express what I take to be the 
thoughts of Jesus in the current colloquial language of 
our time. There is no attempt at word-by-word trans- 
lation; my motive has been to bring out as much as 
possible of what is suggested without adding or 
omitting anything. The studies which follow the para- 
phrase first appeared in The Methodist Times, though 
they have been considerably expanded for republica- 
tion, I am glad to bear testimony to the kindness of 
the editor of that paper; he has not only allowed, but 
urged their reissue. 

The leading idea of these studies is that the ideal 
described by Jesus is not so much a “counsel of perfec- 
tion” as the only really wholesome and natural way of 
life possible for men with natures like ours in a world 
like this; that the appeal of the Teacher is never merely 
to questionable theory, but to facts which all men ac- 
knowledge. I have tried honestly to face the difficul- 

Vv 


v1 Note by the Author 


ties which seem most real to me, but such exposition as 
I have attempted is deliberately untechnical and con- 
cerns actual life rather than pure thought. The giving 
of references is avoided of set purpose, because the aim 
oi the studies contained in this volume is exclusively 
practical. Readers of Jesus as they saw Him will per- 
haps recognise some of the same ideas here; but the 
chief purpose of that volume was to interest readers in 
the Synoptic Gospels, and so bring them to the feet 
of the Saviour whose form and figure can be seen per- 
haps most clearly there; here I am concerned rather to 
try and shew the liveableness of the way of life He 
proclaims. I should like once more to thank my friends, 
and most of all, my teacher, Dr. Rendel Harris, for all 
the help, encouragement and direction they continue to 
give me. 


CONTENTS 


Note by the Author 


The Sermon on the Mount: A Paraphrase . 


I 
IT 


The Age to Which Jesus Came 
Town and Country in Syria 
The Jew at Home and Abroad 
Jesus and the Pharisees 

The Breach with the Pharisees 
The Beatitudes . 

The Old Religion and the New 
Sex-Relations 

On Truthfulness in Speech . 
On True Justice . 

On Patriotism 

The Perfect Law of Liberty 
On the Practice of Charity . 
On Prayer 

The Lord’s Prayer . 

On Self-Discipline 

On the Saving of Money 


vil 


114 


Vill 
XVIII 
P.aid.¢ 
xX 


XXI 
XXII 


XXIII 
XXIV 

XXV 
XXVI 


Contents 


Then Why Does Provision Fail? 
Necessities and Luxuries 

“peek Ve First. 

His Life of Trust and Our Distrustfulness 


What Are We to Do with Our Critical 
Faculty ? ‘ 


On Reverence 

The Christian Adventure 

“Other Foundation Can No Man Lay” 
The Last Fear and the Way Through It 


PAGE 


119 
126 
134 


140 


146 
I51 
157 
163 


172 


THE REALISM OF JESUS 


THE REALISM OF JESUS 


The Sermon on the Mount 
A Paraphrase 


Chapter 5.—When He saw the crowds gathering 
He went up to higher ground; there He sat down, and 
when His disciples had come up to Him, He opened 
His heart to them, saying in the course of His teach- 
ing: “I have good news for the lowly-minded, to them 
belongs the new age that God is bringing in; for 
mourners—there is good cheer in store for them; for 
the patient and forbearing—theirs by native right is 
the lordship of the life of man; for those who are 
hungry and thirsty for the ideal life—they shall receive 
full satisfaction; for the brotherly—they shall be 
treated with brotherly consideration; for those who 
long for purity 1—they shall look upon God’s face; 
for peacemakers—they shall be called God’s men in 
the world; to those who have ever suffered hardship 
in the cause of right—God’s new world is their pos- 
session. That is why you should never fear persecu- 
tion; indeed, when you have to put up with reproach, 
ill-treatment, every kind of slander, all because you 
will be My disciples, you should welcome your troubles 


*Or “for the single-minded.” 
II 


12 The Realism of Jesus 


with exulting joy; you will be real prophets then, and 
God will reward such people as you in His own great 
way. You are the salt of Society; that is what you 
were meant for, to keep life wholesome, to make it 
bearable. No one has any use for insipid salt; people 
pitch the stuff into the street, and there is an end of it. 
You are all the light the world has; like yonder town 
on the hill-top, you cannot hide if you try. Even with 
the lamp at home, you do not light it, and then put it 
under a basin, but on the lampstand, so that everyone 
in the room may see by its light. Take care then that 
your light shines out in all men’s sight, that they may 
not fail to be struck by the rightness of the things 
you do, and may come to thank God that they ever 
met you. Do not suppose that I have come to destroy 
the old religion; my mission is not to supersede the 
ancient sanctions, rather to unfold their deeper mean- 
ing. Mark this! the universe itself shall pass away 
before the smallest detail of God’s law revealed in 
Scripture comes to be out of date; rather shall every 
part of it disclose a larger truth. It follows that the 
man whose teaching lessens the force of what seems 
to be the least important of God’s laws, has a very 
humble place in the age which I proclaim; on the other 
hand, he whose practice and teaching enhance their 
authority shall have wide influence there. All the same, 
your living out of the moral law must go far beyond 
the code of conduct for which your professional moral- 
ists stand; only a new way of life can qualify you for 
the new world that is coming. 

“I will illustrate My meaning; you know the old 
words of Scripture, ‘You are not to commit murder’ ; 


The Sermon on the Mount 13 


your teachers go on to say, ‘Whoever kills must stand 
his trial.’ What I have to tell you is that everyone 
who persists in unreasonable anger with a brother-man, 
must stand his trial; whoever treats another with con- 
tempt shall be indicted for blasphemy; whoever curses 
another shall bring upon himself the doom he has in- 
voked. And more than this; until you are on good 
terms with your brother, you must not bring your gift 
to God’s altar; if you remember, when you have 
brought your gift, that he has anything against you, 
better leave your gift where it is, go and make friends 
with your brother, and then come and offer your gift. 
Never lose a chance of making friends; if you are 
involved in a lawsuit, you should come to an under- 
standing with your opponent on the way to court. Re- 
member, God is judge; if you are responsible for pro- 
longing the quarrel, it will be you He will condemn, 
whatever happens to the other man; the man who 
nurses ill-will always pays, and to the last penny too. 

“Again the word of Scripture runs, ‘You must not 
commit adultery.’ What I have to say on this subject 
is; everyone who casts upon a woman a lustful look 
has already in his heart seduced her. If some passion 
of this kind is your hindrance, you must tear yourself 
away from it at all costs; better live a thwarted life, 
than with all your bodily powers about you, to be 
plunged into a hell of unsatisfied desire. If your daily 
business puts a hindrance in your way, be rid of it at 
all hazards; better be a broken man, than in the full 
tide of your well-being to find yourself in hell. The 
old law ran: “Whoever would be rid of his wife must 
make proper provision for her!’ I goa stage further 


14 The Realism of Jesus 


and say, even if there has been misconduct, you are 
not to part company with your wives at all; if you do, 
you are to blame if they go wrong, while the man who 
marries a woman already divorced commits adultery 
himself. 

“Another illustration: you have all heard the law 
once given to your fathers; ‘You must not commit 
perjury, but must fulfil your vows as in God’s sight.’ 
I tell you, you should not need to swear by this and 
that at all. Heaven is God’s throne, earth His foot- 
stool, Jerusalem the city of the greatest of all Kings; 
your head, for the matter of that, is sacred too—you 
know you cannot make one hair really white or black. 
Great words like these are God’s gift to you, and are 
not to be used as makeweights to your light talk. “Yes, 
yes’; ‘No, no’; there is emphasis enough for you; when 
you go beyond such simple speech you are giving the 
devil his chance. 

“Once more; you know the words ‘Eye for eye, 
tooth for tooth’; your teachers explain them as mean- 
ing ‘slap for slap, or give as good as you get.’ I tell 
you that to follow the promptings of revenge is to 
measure yourself with the devil. Whoever slaps you 
on the right side of the neck, let him do it again if he 
wants to;1 if someone takes you into the law-courts, 
and to pay the cost of the case, you have to forfeit your 
under-garment, make him a present of your upper- 
garment as well; if you are pressed to go one mile on 
Government faa of your own accord accompany the 
officer who conscripts you the rest of the league.?, You 


That is, “if anyone insults you.” 
® Reading with Codex Bezae “two miles more.’ 


The Sermon on the Mount 15 


are to be at the service of every claimant, and are not 
to turn churlishly away from anyone who wants to 
borrow of you. 

“Again; you have heard the words of Scripture, 
“Love your fellow-countrymen,” and know the con- 
clusion your teachers draw ; ‘Of course this means that 
you are to hate all foreigners.’ I tell you, you must 
love those whom you have learnt to think of as your 
enemies, and, if they treat you badly, must pray for 
them. So shall you really be like God your Father; 
you know He makes His sun shine down on bad and 
good alike, and sends His rain on all men, whether 
they obey or disobey His will. Supposing you love 
those only who love you in return, there is no special 
merit in that, is there? Quite disreputable people rival 
you there! Or if you are friends only with the people 
of your own set, that implies nothing more than aver- 
age good-nature; the very heathen are equal to that. 
You are to be God’s men; your love is to be as catholic 
as His. 

Chapter 6.—‘“Be careful not to follow the way of 
life now laid down for you with one eye upon the 
effect you produce; if you do so, you take all the virtue 
out of it from God’s point of view. When you are 
practising your charities, you are not to obtrude them 
upon public notice as self-advertising philanthropists 
do in church and street, to win the applause of the 
public. Of course, they have something to show for 
their outlay, but that is all it amounts to. When you 
are doing a brotherly action, your left hand is not to 
know what your right hand is about; you are not even 
to feel virtuous about it. Nor need you concern your- 


16 The Realism of Jesus 


selves about reward, for there are no secrets to which 
God is not a party, and He will make it up to you. 
“When you pray, you are not to go about it like the 
people who air their piety; you know how fond they 
are of engaging in prayer for the edification of on- 
lookers. They get what they want—a reputation for 
devotion; but God your Father has nothing to do with 
this kind of thing. When any one of you is drawn to 
pray, he will do well to go apart and retire into himself, 
there holding converse with God who dwells in secret 
places; his Father, from whom no secrets are hid, will 
Himself reward him. When you are praying in com- 
pany with others, do not talk for the sake of talking, 
as the heathen do in their endless sing-song prayers; 
leave it to them to think they can impress Heaven by 
grandiloquence. You must not be like them, for you 
must remember that your Father knows what you want 
before you begin to ask. I will give you a model for 
your public prayers; ‘Our Father God, may all men 
come to know and revere Thee by the name of Father ; 
let Thy new world come, Thy will be all men’s law, 
on earth, as in heaven; give us to-day our food for 
the day that is coming;! and release us from our 
debts, as we too have released our debtors; and 
bring us not into trial, but rescue us from the devil.’ 
You see, if you have forgiven your fellow-men their 
offences against you, your Father will also forgive you 
your offences against Him; if you will not, neither 
will He forgive you. , 
“When you are keeping Lent, do not go about with 
a sour expression, as do those who fast for appearance’ 


*Or “our needful food.” 


The Sermon on the Mount 17 


sake. You know they murder their natural good looks, 
that everybody may see what martyrs they are. Of 
course, they, like the others, get the reputation they 
desire. When any one of you resolves on a season 
of abstinence, he should be better groomed and more 
sociable than usual; the attention of his friends is not 
to be drawn to his self-denial. His Father who dwells 
in the hidden life of the heart will see it; his Father 
who reads all secrets will reward him. 

‘Do not hoard material possessions; the moth will 
get into your wardrobe, rust will tarnish your gold, 
thieves may break into your strong rooms and carry 
allaway. Your provision for future needs is to be laid 
up in God’s bank; no moth, no rust, with Him; no 
one can rob you of that treasure. You know a man’s 
interest is sure to centre round the concerns in which 
his savings are invested. The eye is the lamp of the 
soul, and everything in your life depends on the clear- 
ness of your vision. Just as when the lamp at home 
burns badly, the room you live in looks dark and for- 
bidding, but if the light is good, all around it reflects 
its radiance; so with your social life. If a man looks 
at others without suspicion or prejudice, his life with 
his fellows is all sweetness and light; if, on the other 
hand, his way of thinking about them is churlish and 
grudging, the world he lives in will look gloomy in- 
deed; he carries the outer darkness about with him! 
You must make your choice, then, between devotion 
to God and absorption in the world’s business. No 
man can bind himself down to the service of more 
than one master at a time; he will either dislike the 


18 The Realism of Jesus 


one and love the other, or he will become attached to 
one and neglect the other. 

“So I bid you not to worry about yourselves, so far 
as food and clothes are concerned. You are far more 
than the food you eat, your bodies do not depend for 
their beauty upon the clothes you wear. Study the 
wild birds—they do not sow or reap, or lay up a store 
against the winter; yet God your Father looks after 
them, and you are more precious in His sight than 
they! Worry never makes your life any longer, does 
it? What then is the use of worrying about clothes? 
Learn a lesson from the wild flowers—they do not 
work for their living or make their own clothes, yet I 
tell you that Solomon in full dress was not so well 
clothed as they. If God dresses so well what you call 
‘common grass,’ the flowers which grow in the meadow 
to-day and are cast into the oven to-morrow, surely He 
will take more pains with you, your poor mistrustful 
people! You must not let yourselves worry then, or 
say, ‘How are we going to make ends meet?’ or, ‘What 
about the clothes I want so badly?’ The thoughts of 
the worldly revolve round subjects like these; God your 
Father knows all the things you want! The bringing 
in of God’s new world, the practice of the way of life 
prescribed to you by Him, should be your first concern; 
all other needful things will come your way, if this 
be so. Live a day at a time, and let to-morrow look 
after itself. Every day that comes brings its own 
burden of care, and one day’s trouble at a time is as 
much as you can manage. 

Chapter 7. “Do not indulge your critical faculties 
too freely—you lay yourself open to criticism if you 


The Sermon on the Mount 19 


do; in the long run you will be done by as you did. 
Why do you take so much notice of the splinter in your 
brother-man’s eye, never stopping to reflect that there 
is a whole log in your own? Why do you busy your- 
selves with other men’s small faults so much, and for- 
get your own big ones? Self-deluded man, first get 
rid of the log in your own eye, then you will see 
straight to pick the splinter out of your brother’s eye! 

“Your fellowship with Me and each other is your 
signet-ring,! your circlet of pearls; you are not to ex- 
pose this sacred bond to the tender mercies of cynical 
outsiders and scandalmongers; if you do, they will 
trample what should be sacred to you in the dirt, then 
turn upon you and take away your character too. On 
the other hand, he who has a precious thing and does 
not share it with others, commits a sin.?_ Ask, and you 
shall receive; seek, and you shall find; knock, and the 
door shall fly open. Everyone who persists in asking 
gets something; the seeker makes discoveries; to the 
persevering knocker God’s door does open. Yes, you 
will always get something for the asking, and it will 
be something good. There is not a man among you 
who would give his boy a stone when asked for a loaf, 
or a snake as a substitute for a fish, is there? If then, 
sinful men like you know what is best to give your 
children, surely you can trust your Heavenly Father 
to give good things to those that ask Him! My rule 


of life is this: you are to treat everyone as you would 


1 Reading, by a slight change in the suggested Aramaic original, 
“signet-ring” for “holy thing.” 

* Supplied from Tatian’s harmony of the Four Gospels—the 
“Diatessaron.” 


20 The Realism of Jesus 


like people to treat you; this is the essence of God’s 
revealed law of conduct. 


“The door I have opened to you now is narrow, but 
you must enter it; the road that leads to a wasted life 
is broad and smooth, and there is always company 
enough that way; the gate is narrow and the road 
toilsome which leads to life in God’s new world, and 
few discover where it lies. Do not be misled by men 
who beckon you another way—they call themselves 
prophets and come, looking as harmless as sheep— 
really they are greedy wolves: you can tell what they 
are only by the mischief they make. You do not gather 
grapes from a thorn-bush, or figs from the thistle, do 
you? So every tree whose fruit is wholesome is a 
good tree to have in your garden; but if its fruit 
disagrees with you, you had best keep away from it. 
It is not in nature for fruit that is good to eat to come 
from a tree that is bad, nor for a poisonous bush to 
bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good 
fruit is fated to be cut down and burnt. This, then, 


is the test you are to apply—you can measure their 


sin It is not a ques- 
tion of words merely, for not everyone who calls Me 
‘Lord, Lord’ shall have a place in God’s new world. 
Nor is it only a question of the results that men can 
see, for in the day when I come again many shall say, 
‘Lord, Lord, have we not been great prophets, saved 
men from the sway of dark powers of evil, healed them 
body and soul, and all in your service?’ And after 
all I shall have to tell them publicly, ‘You were never 
Mine; depart from Me; you are rebels, all of you.’ 
All depends upon the reality of men’s relations with 


The Sermon on the Mount 21 


Me. The man who listens to My words and carries 
them into action is like a sensible builder, who builds 
his house upon solid rock. The rainy season comes, 
the river rises, fierce gusts of wind come sweeping 
down upon the house, yet it does not fall; its founda- 
tion stands secure upon the rock. As for the man, 
whoever he be, who listens to My words and does not 
try to live them out, he is like a heedless builder, who 
builds his house in the valley-sand. The rainy season 
comes, the river rises, fierce gusts of wind batter the 
house—it sways—then down it comes in utter ruin.” 


I 
The Age to which Jesus Came 


In no field of research has knowledge grown so rap- 
idly during the last twenty years as in the study of the 
life and language of the people in the countries which 
look out upon the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, at 
the time when the Saviour was born. It is no exag- 
geration to say that the centuries which preceded and 
followed the beginning of the Christian era are more 
accurately known, as well as spiritually more akin to 
us, than are the sixteenth, seventeenth, or even perhaps 
the eighteenth centuries in the history of our own 
country. That is partly because, like our own, it was 
an age of books, papers, and letters; unlike our own, 
an age when books and letters were kept. Writing 
materials were not as scarce and dear as the scholars 
of the last generation were inclined to think, and as 
they became later, and everybody wrote or got someone 
else to write for them. Year by year an abundant 
stream of documents has been recovered from the sand 
of Egypt, into which they were once dropped, or un- 
wrapped from her mummies, and the life of the people 
of Egypt and Syria has written itself out for our 
edification down to its smallest details, in records which 
can be trusted, because they were never intended for 


publication. Of the times of Our Lord His word has 
22 


The Age to which Jesus Came 23 


been strangely fulfilled; what was spoken in the ear 
in the inner chamber has been proclaimed from the 
house-tops. Not only did the Son of God come “in 
the fulness of the time”—that is, at the ideal time—but 
care has been taken that we moderns should have a 
better chance than any previous generation of Chris- 
tians has enjoyed, of understanding His Message— 
becatise we can know so much more of the world to 
which it came. 

In the Greco-Roman world of those days they had 
their morning newspapers, their trade-guilds, their 
laments about the decay of the middle classes and the 
falling birth-rate, their crowded cities and depopulated 
countryside, their new rich and war-profiteers, their 
Socialist agitators, their fully organised credit and 
banking system. We know how their cheques were 
made out and how their trade accounts were presented 
and receipted. “In such matters as transit, public 
health, police, water-supply, engineering, building and 
so forth, Rome of the second century left off pretty 
much where the Victorian age was to resume. The 
hot-air system which warms the hotels of modern 
Europe and America was in general use in every com- 
fortable villa of the first century. Education was more 
general and more accessible to the poor in A.D 200 
than in a.D. 1850.” The vices of the age were largely 
the same as ours, with some significant exceptions; 
they were luxury, gambling, and the mad rush for 
wealth along with appalling sexual immorality and a 
degrading idleness at both ends of the social scale. 
They had their revues, their star-actors and profes- 
sional athletes who earned fabulous wages, they had 


24 The Realism of Jesus 


their comic artists and cartoonists, their horse-races 
and betting on horses, their public libraries in every 
moderately large town (given by munificent donors 
whose names are duly recorded), and their private col- 
lections of books, their art-collectors and curio-hunters, 
while tourists thought less of passing from one end to 
the other of the Mediterranean than did our great- 
grandfathers of travelling from London to Edinburgh. 
There were universities, too, attracting students from 
all parts of the Roman world, there were itinerant lec- 
turers and street-preachers, while “honorary” degrees 
were as numerous and often as unmeaning as they are 
coming to be now. Our modern boxing contests, it is 
true, only faintly recall their gladiatorial shows, but 
they minister to the same instinct. It was a restless 
neurotic age of disillusionment, for peace and pros- 
perity had not brought rest to the souls of men; their 
virility sapped by a succession of world wars, they had 
not yet been able to make the best of the great peace. 

We must not jump to the conclusion, however, that 
Christianity has not meant incalculable moral and social 
progress. Hilarion writes a charming love-letter to his 
wife, and we are drawn very near to him; he ends his 
note by charging her, quite as a matter of course, to 
expose her newly-born child, if it is a girl, and we 
realise with a start the difference Christ has made. 
Seneca, one of their loftiest ethical teachers, says quite 
coolly, ‘““Weak and misshapen infants we drown, for 
it is not anger, but reason, to separate the useless from 
the healthy”; even the modern eugenist is not capable 
of this. The more usual practice with unwanted chil- 
dren was to leave them for some passer-by to pick up 


The Age to which Jesus Came 25 


if he chose and there was a flourishing trade in 
foundlings, who were kept and trained for immoral 
purposes. Vices were recognised and indeed fashion- 
able then which are now criminal offences, and then 
there were the slaves—in Rome alone in 5 B.C. more 
than half a million of them. Slaves from the West 
were employed chiefly on the land, those from the 
East in domestic and skilled labour. They were abso- 
lutely at the mercy of their masters, and their number, 
of course, diminished the demand for free work and 
lowered wages ; this process in turn sent the rural popu- 
lations into the vices and idleness of the towns. The 
proletariat of Rome was kept at the expense of the 
State, and all the cruelties of the emperors were perpe- 
trated at the expense of the old families; the reigning 
monarch was always popular among the masses and in 
the provinces. Instead of strikes they had the vastly 
more dangerous and horribly cruel slave-wars. 

The old Greek and Roman religions had quite lost 
their hold upon educated and uneducated alike, and 
from the time when Alexander’s conquests had opened 
up the East as far as India to Western travellers and 
merchants, a steady infiltration of Oriental religions 
had set in. One after another they had been admitted 
into Rome and officially recognised there. The 
mystery religions, an earlier importation from Syria 
and Egypt, had long had a great vogue in Greece; in 
this period they became the dominant religions of the 
civilised world. They all offered some satisfaction to 
the universal craving for a warmer and more sym- 
pathetic faith, appealing to the emotions, they all 
catered for men’s agelong love of secret initiation and 


26 The Realism of Jesus 


mysterious ritual. For the purposes of our study, their 
most significant characteristic, common to all of them, 
is to be found in the fact that they centred upon the 
idea of a god or hero who died and rose again, thus 
ministering to the hope of immortality. The new god 
from the East was depicted in their ceremonial pa- 
geantry as set upon and torn to pieces by the represen- 
tatives of older faiths, only to be born again, as spring 
comes to life again after the dark, sad months of 
winter. Ina bath of blood, or in secret mystical rites 
finding their climax in a sacramental meal in which 
the participants share the eternal life of their god, men 
can be born again to everlasting youth. 

None of these cults, it will have been noticed, had 
any direct connexion with anything which we should 
call morality—only with ceremonial purifications—and 
indeed many of them were bound up with vicious 
sexual practices of the most demoralising kind. All 
the same, they were a most potent factor in the 
preparation of the Western world for the coming of 
Christianity. Side by side with these popular religions 
ran the imperial cult imposed upon the East by the 
West, as the mystery-religions had been taught to the 
West by the East. It found a ready welcome every- 
where except amongst the Jews, because it expressed 
men’s gratitude for the great Roman peace, the im- 
mense improvement in order and prosperity that the 
Empire brought in its train. It as associated in the 
Oriental mind with the breaking down of national 
frontiers and the fact, impressed upon men in a hun- 
dred and one ways every day of their lives, of a catholic 
state in being. This prepared the way, along another 


The Age to which Jesus Came 27 


channel, for the idea of a universal Kingdom as 
preached by Jesus. In reconstructions of the life of 
Christ it has often been forgotten, or at least not 
sufficiently emphasised, that Syria was then part of the 
Roman Empire. Though unlike the rest of the world 
in many ways, some of which I hope to discuss in 
another chapter, all round Nazareth there ran in full 
strength the currents of this strange, many-coloured, 
restless heathen life. We need very badly another life 
of Christ taking into account our new knowledge of 
its place in the greater world, 


II 
Town and Country in Syria 


GALILEE in Our Lord’s day was far less isolated from 
the greater Roman world than was Jerusalem. Up to 
this time, indeed until a.p. 40 when the emperor 
Caligula threatened, to set up his statue in the Temple, 
the imperial government had been signally considerate 
to the susceptibilities of the Jews of Jerusalem. A 
special coinage without the head of the reigning em- 
peror was issued for their benefit, though it was stipu- 
lated that the taxes should be paid in the recognised 
Roman money. In the Temple, on the other hand, the 
imperial coinage was forbidden, and a flourishing trade 
in money changing, with a commission on the trans- 
action, was carried on in the court of the Gentiles. 
Moreover, all Jews were exempt from military service 
because of their Sabbath-law, and their absence from 
the ceremonies of the imperial religion was tacitly ex- 
cused everywhere. Julius Cesar, the founder of the 
Empire, was specially favourable to them, and they 
were prominent in the public mourning at the time of 
his assassination. There was a reaction after this, but 
it was only under pressure from headquarters that 
Herod ventured to carry through the census in Judea 
at the time when Jesus was born; even then, he modi- 


fied the usual arrangements, and allowed Jews to re- 
28 


Town and Country in Syria 29 


turn to their native-town for the enrolment; this was 
not the general Roman practice. A fence, “the middle- 
wall of partition’ as Paul calls it, had been set up en- 
closing all the Temple proper for the use of Jews only, 
no Gentile being permitted to pass this boundary on 
pain of death, and this exclusion was not merely 
sanctioned, but enforced, by the Roman authority. 
Julius Cesar had, moreover, restored to the Jews many 
of the towns which Pompey had taken from them, and 
there justice was administered in the synagogues by 
Jewish magistrates, only the right to carry out a death- 
sentence being reserved for the imperial power. 

We must distinguish between towns where the Jews 
held the predominance from those which came under 
the normal imperial régime. At the time when Jesus 
was born, Herod represented the Roman power in 
Judza; after the short reign of Archelaus, his succes- 
sor, a Roman governor took his place, while Herod 
Antipas was charged with the administration of Galilee 
and Perea, the district which lay between the south 
end of the lake of Galilee and the Dead Sea on the 
eastern side of the Jordan. To the east and south-east 
of the lake lay ten Greek cities in which Greek culture 
and Greek vices held free sway; they had their amphi- 
theatres within a comparatively short distance of 
Galilee itself. Czesarea was not far away to the south- 
west, and Czsarea was a Roman city; while due west- 
ward over the hills of Upper Galilee you came to the 
Greek and Roman seaport town Ptolemais, the “far 
country’—though all too near—to which the prodigal 
son from many a Jewish home would betake himself. 
On the lake itself Herod held the fortified city of 


30 The Realism of Jesus 


Tiberias, from which he kept the plain of Gennesaret 
almost literally under his eyes, and to the northward 
was Cesarea Philippi, with its marble temple set up 
upon a rock in honour of the emperor. Galilee itself 
was full of Gentiles and so came to be called “‘Galilee 
of the Gentiles” ; the towns by the lakeside, nominally 
Jewish, were crowded with men of all nationalities. 
This was specially true of Tarichee and Tiberias; all 
strict Jews avoided the latter, as Herod had violated 
an old graveyard to make room for his new city be- 
tween the mountains and the lake; and so he had been 
compelled to populate it with the scum of all nations. 

The Galileans themselves, and by the Galileans IL 
mean the Jews who had been long settled in Galilee, like, 
the Syrians of later days, were either peasants (fella- 
heen) or townspeople (belladeen). Nazareth was an 
unwalled village, and Jesus belonged to the peasant- 
class. His parents’ home, that is to say, would be a 
cottage built of mud, in which the family lived by night 
and day in one room, lit by what is called in the Gospels 
a “lamp,” but was really a bowl of oil on the top of a 
wooden stand, and warmed in winter by a fire of green 
wood, the smoke from which could only escape, when 
the door was closed, by one or two small slits in the 
wall and roof. Here the family would sleep, each on 
his own mattress; there was no undressing, but the 
“beds” were rolled up and put away in a recess during 
the day. The lamp was kept alight all night for fear 
of spirits, and in winter, when the weather in the hill- 
country is often extremely cold, the fire was never 
allowed to go out. In some of the more ambitious 
cottages by the lakeside there was probably a roof- 


Town and Country in Syria 31 


chamber which could accommodate a lodger, and this 
was perhaps the case with Simon and Andrew’s house 
at Capernaum; but Nazareth would know no such 
luxuries. We can understand that it was not mere 
churlishness that made the unneighbourly neighbour in 
the parable of the friend at midnight so reluctant to 
get up; he could not get to the cupboard without dis- 
turbing the whole family. It is not certain, though it 
is quite likely, that there was a school at Nazareth; 
at any rate there was a synagogue, ‘and most of our 
Lord’s knowledge of the Old Testament would be ac- 
quired there, for very few peasant families would pos- 
sess copies of any of the Scriptures. Altogether dis- 
tinct from the “people of the land,” as they were 
contemptuously called, were the townspeople, who were 
engaged in various trades, and lived very much more 
comfortable lives, and the fishermen, who were despised 
because their work obliged them to go almost naked. 
Jesus, then, was by birth and upbringing a member 
of the poorest and least advanced class of Syrian peas- 
antry; He came from one of those Arab villages into 
which the Western traveller finds it so difficult to get 
admittance. Nazareth is not on the main road to the 
coast, but is in sight of the “way of the sea,” if one 
climbs to the top of the hill on the side of which the 
village still stands. The “stable” in which He was 
born would not be an inn-stable, for if “there was no 
room for Him in the inn,” it is certain there would be 
no room in the inn-stable. In the peasant’s house the 
space near the door where a beast can be tethered is 
called the stable, and the “manger’’ is sometimes a 
rough pit dug out in the mud floor, sometimes a 


32 The Realism of Jesus 


wooden trough raised a little way from the ground. 
The Son of God, if He had searched from end to end 
of the Roman world, could scarcely have stooped lower. 
All His life He probably wore the peasant dress; we 
can understand why Simon the Pharisee thought it 
enough to ask the young countryman to dinner without 
troubling about the courtesies usual amongst gentle- 
folk! It is clear from the one authentic story of His 
boyhood which has come down to us that Jesus found 
His home-life unsatisfying and was glad to linger in 
the Temple among His Father’s people for a little 
while. The services in the synagogue had only made 
Him long to know more of the book of which the 
Rabbis spoke from Sabbath to Sabbath, and He must 
have looked forward with intense eagerness to His 
first visit to Jerusalem, where surely He could find 
men who could teach Him more. What memories 
visited Him on the quiet hills of another life with God 
His Father we do not know, but as the years went by 
the fact that He was somehow different from the other 
village people must have been more and more borne 
in upon Him. He would form His own estimate of 
the sermons to which He listened, but, whatever He 
thought of their preaching, He could not but be im- 
pressed by the Pharisee, the man to whom at any rate 
religion was the most important thing in life. Many 
of the peasant-people were Pharisees, as far as devotion 
to the law was concerned, though we gather that it was 
only rarely that any of them aspired to become a Rabbi. 
Even in Nazareth the power and prestige of the Rabbis 
must have been one of the outstanding realities of 
every-day life; they preached in the synagogues, taught 


Town and Country in Syria 33 


in the schools, and administered justice day by day. 
In Jewish villages the heads of families acted as magis- 
trates, but Rabbis who lived in the neighbourhood were 
always called in as assessors, and practically settled the 
verdict. They were not clergy, for they worked at 
their trades during the day, and taught in their leisure- 
hours; but their power was as great as that of any 
priesthood. Sentences passed at their suggestion were 
submitted to, though they had no legal right to enforce 
them. The imperial government interfered as little as 
possible with local administration, so long as taxes were 
paid. The Rabbis not only administered the law; they 
made it, and in the villages their authority was un- 
questioned, In the next chapter we shall examine a 
little more closely the strength and the weakness of 
their position. 


III 
The Jew at Home and Abroad 


THROUGH the restless pagan world described in Chap- 
ter I there moved the Jew, everywhere to be met with 
and everywhere at home. Envied for his success in 
commerce, disliked because of his proud reserve and 
uncanny prosperity, a reluctant and somewhat super- 
cilious missionary of his faith, he had become the riddle 
of the Roman world, and his meeting-houses and places 
of prayer, to be found in every town of any size in 
some back street or by the riverside, were watched and 
~ attended by crowds of devout or curious enquirers. In 
the universal corruption of manners his home-life was 
strangely wholesome; he alone of all men kept away 
from the theatre and the arena, and his devotion to the 
sabbath-law had already procured for him exemption 
from military service. His deliberate avoidance of 
participation in emperor-worship went for long without 
challenge. Of course thére were any number of Jews 
of another type, but it was the real Jew, the ‘““Pharisee,” 
who was noticed and feared, openly ridiculed and se- 
cretly admired. By the time the Fourth Gospel came 
to be written the Pharisees were known as “the Jews.” 

When the Gentile, easily impressed by the Jew’s piety 
and puritanism, in a world which knew little of either, 
sought to discover the secret of his strength and se- 

34 


The Jew at Home and Abroad 35 


renity, the answer was quickly forthcoming. There 
it was in black and white, in his mouth and in his heart, 
for in the book of the law, the substance of which he 
carried about with him on all his sacred days on brow 
and wrist, the whole will of God was written. He 
needed no longer to seek for God or struggle for the at- 
tainment of peace here and eternal life hereafter; he 
had the secret, for on obedience to the revealed will of 
God, and on that alone, depended the happiness and 
health of men. His book had already been translated 
into Greek, the world-language, and was thus at the 
disposal of the Gentiles. Sensitive spirits like Virgil 
soon found in verses of Isaiah the best expression of 
their own dreams of the golden age. 

Like Protestants of a later day, the Pharisee had his 
inspired infallible book; like them, he believed in the 
right of private judgment within certain well-defined 
limits. One of these limits consisted in the fact that 
all exposition must be in line with inspired tradition; 
on this side he more nearly approaches the Romanist 
position. But his official interpreters were laymen, not 
priests; they were the “‘scribes’—the name “Rabbis” 
to designate the class is later than the Gospels, though 
scribes were addressed as “Rabbi.” Their authority 
rested upon the consent of the Church as a whole, not 
upon ordination. They were, however, mostly re- 
cruited from the Rabbinic schools, which consisted of 
groups of young men gathered round him by a popular 
Scribe; though they had no rite of priestly ordination, 
they were in practice co-opted. It has been pointed out 
in the last chapter that they were law-administrators 
and law-makers as well as teachers. All their decisions 


36 The Realism of Jesus 


were professedly deductions from the law of Moses, 
interpreted according to the precedents set by previous 
declarations of accredited Rabbis or conferences of 
Rabbis. Meetings were held periodically, at which 
agreement upon disputed points was arrived at by a 
majority vote. They all practised a trade or profession 
for a living and were supposed to supply instruction 
gratuitously. When we wonder at the storm raised by 
the attacks of Jesus upon the scribes we must remember 
that His was the first onslaught that had been made 
for many years upon a class round whose prestige and 
influence the whole fabric of the nation’s life had been 
built. Most, though by no means all, of them belonged 
to the Pharisaic party; away from Jerusalem, at least, 
the Pharisaic scribe was all powerful, and his power 
rested upon a conviction wonderfully impressive in its 
universality and permanence. It not only survived the 
attacks of Jesus, but became so much stronger in the 
centuries that followed, that Pharisaism became all the 
Judaism that was left when the Temple disappeared. 
In Jerusalem their strength was so preponderant that 
they formed the majority of members of the San- 
hedrin, in spite of the fact that their bitter opponents, 
the Sadducees, held the official positions. 

Before we can begin to understand the attitude 
eventually taken up by Jesus toward the Pharisees we 
must try to do them justice. We owe to them not 
only the preservation of the whole Old Testament, but 
also the idea of public worship, not in a central temple 
but in a local meeting-house—for the “chapel” or “‘little 
Bethel” is older than the “church’”—and the first sug- 
gestion to the world of real democracy, or government 


The Jew at Home and Abroad 37 


by consent of the governed. We owe to them, too, 
the idea of compulsory education, free and open to all 
equally. The Jew is the father of institutions, the ex- 
pert in the practical organisation of great ideas. These 
ideas came to him by research in the Scriptures of the 
Old Testament, not by any process or reasoning, as 
was the case with the Greek, or by the pressure of prac- 
tical need, as with the Roman and the Britisher. Serv- 
ices were held in the synagogue twice every Sabbath 
day, in the morning and in the afternoon, and twice 
during the week, on Monday and Thursday. Lessons 
were read according to a fixed lectionary at the morn- 
ing service, the first from the law, the second from 
the prophets. It is not certain that the Hebrew original 
was read at all; later at any rate there was an official 
Targum, or Aramaic paraphrase, used in Palestine, and 
perhaps this, not the text of the Old Testament itself, 
was preached from by Jesus at Nazareth. The 
Targum of the passage in question reads: “The Spirit 
of prophecy is upon Me, because it has brought Me 
up.” No wonder the congregation exclaimed “Is not 
this Joseph’s son?” 

We owe to the Pharisees, too, the idea of preaching 
from a text, of ordered and organised exposition. In 
regard to the sermon, any distinguished stranger might 
be called upon by the official in charge of the service to 
deliver an address; anyone, even if he was not of age, 
could be chosen to read the lessons. This latter fact 
surely proves fairly conclusive that the original 
Hebrew, in Our Lord’s time a dead language known 
only to the learned, could not have been read, even 
though an interpreter was provided. Even the struc- 


38 The Realism of Jesus 


ture and arrangement of our Church buildings, so far 
as aisles, porches, and the position of the pulpit are 
concerned, follow the Pharisaic model, Indeed, our 
debt to the much-maligned Pharisee is greater than we 
know. 

The essential weakness of Pharisee-religion is to be 
found in the fact that devotion to a Person, God, had 
been submerged in devotion to a thing, the book. The 
book, whatever its source, is written in human words, 
and words are inevitably ambiguous. It follows that 
an infallible commentary is required to explain the 
meaning of the infallible book. The Rabbinic theory 
was that the “tradition of the elders” did not add any- 
thing to the Torah, but only brought out its hidden 
meaning. The nation had sailed on its voyage with 
sealed orders; the scribe was entrusted with the task of 
opening the envelope, and interpreting its contents, In 
dealing with the multitudinous details of everyday life, 
he contented himself, it was declared, with drawing 
inferences from what was already laid down in Torah. 
A parallel to his treatment of the problems of conduct 
on the basis of “the law’ can be found, Mr. H. G. 
Wood has suggested, in Baxter’s Christian Directory, 
where counsel is given upon the minutest details of 
conduct by an elaborate system of “particular infer- 
ences” from Scripture. But “who shall guard the 
guardians themselves’? The interpreters themselves 
need interpreters, until the whole body of doctrine ex- 
pounded and re-expounded becomes intolerably burden- 
some, as Jesus declares it to have been in His time. 
For the book Jesus, in the First and Fourth Gospels 
alike, substitutes Himseli—a stupendous claim! In 


The Jew at Home and Abroad 39 


the Fourth Gospel He argues that He embodies in His 
own perfect Sonship the ideal of obedience which was 
the foundation of Rabbinic religion, in the First He 
says first “for righteousness’ sake,” then “for My sake” 
—the two are assumed to be one without argument! 
Romanism with its infallible Church, the extremer 
forms of Protestantism with their infallible book, are 
thus alike the children of Judaism; indeed within the 
Church Judaism is always the enemy, because it is the 
one alternative to spiritual religion for earnest men; 
it offers a kind of satisfaction to the same instincts and 
demands the same sacrificial loyalty. It provides a 
retreat, attractive and accessible, from the fatigue and 
insecurity of private judgment, from the terrible liberty 
wherewith Christ has set us free. 

Because of its intricacy Pharisaism is also forced not 
only to explain, but often to explain away the com- 
plicated and arduous provisions of its written stand- 
ards. To explain away is always easier than to ex- 
plain; thus a system of organised pretence, called 
casuistry, is soon forthcoming. Life is too short for 
fulfilment of the law as interpreted by tradition, and 
so men try, by verbal quibbles and mental tricks, to 
sophisticate themselves into believing and persuading 
others that they are fulfilling a law of conduct, which 
taken literally—and it must be taken literally, or the 
whole edifice of Pharisaism collapses—is impossible of 
fulfilment within the limits of human life and powers 
of endurance. By “hypocrisy” Jesus means every kind 
of unreality, from conscious play-acting to the most 
complete self-delusion. The trouble with the most 
bitter enemies of Jesus was that they had tried so hard 


40 The Realism of Jesus 


to persuade other people that He cast out demons by 
the help of Beelzebul that they had succeeded in per- 
suading themselves of the truth of their lie. It is only 
the simpler forms of self-delusion which meet us in 
the Sermon on the Mount. Something more is to be 
said about the early affinities of Jesus with the higher 
Pharisaism of His time in the next chapter. 


IV 
Jesus and the Pharisees 


WE must not forget that the first disciples of Jesus 
belonged to one section or another of the Pharisees. 
Zacharias and Elizabeth walked “in all the command- 
ments and ordinances of the Lord blamelessly”; in 
other words, though he was of priestly family, they 
were Pharisees, as were Simeon and Anna and prob- 
ably Mary and Joseph. From such little groups of 
Pharisaic quietists Jesus drew His first adherents in 
Jerusalem ; they were the “Israelites indeed,” whom He 
called away from the shelter of “the figtree” of Juda- 
ism to see greater things than the Messiah of their 
dreams, “the Son of God,” “the King of Israel.” He 
did not exaggerate when He called them “the salt of 
society,” “the light of the world,” for in dark death- 
shadowed “Galilee of the Gentiles’ they were all the 
light there was. 

It has been implied in the last sentence that the first 
part of the great Sermon at least should be taken as a 
deliberate appeal to a distinct group of unofficial 
Pharisees. They were called the “poor,” the “meek of 
the earth’; their watchword was “righteousness,” 
while “they shall see God” reminds us again of Na- 
thanael of Cana in Galilee, and of Philo’s explanation 
of the name “Israel” as meaning “the man who sees 

41 


42 The Realism of Jesus 


God.” By striving to keep themselves pure, they hoped 
to attain to the beatific vision—to be Israelites indeed, 
because, like Jacob, the man of peace, they struggle to 
know His secret name, but, unlike him, are “without 
guile.” The traditional ideal of the Pharisaic party 
had always been pacifist; their predecessors, the 
Chasidim, had burnt their fingers badly when, under 
the later Maccabean kings, they had resorted to force, 
and they had learnt their lesson. Some of their 
Rabbis, notably Hillel and the Gamaliel who was Paul’s 
teacher, were very much less severe in their legal de- 
cisions than were the Sadducees, and might claim the 
title of “merciful.” The zealots do not appear as a 
separate organised party till just before the fall of 
Jerusalem; but it is fairly certain that the tendencies 
they represented were strongly developed long before 
that time, and one of the twelve is called by Luke 
“Simon the zealot.” The zealot’s watchword might 
have been “God helps those who help themselves,” that 
of the Pharisees “In God’s good time, but certainly 
not till the chosen people fulfils the law.” It is inter- 
esting to see that Jesus takes sides on this question with 
the Pharisees. 

We may expound the Beatitudes, then, in this way: 
“My appeal is to those who are really poor—‘poor in 
spirit—those who deserve the honourable name of 
‘poor’ in the deeper sense ; to mourners—to those who, 
like their predecessors described by Malachi, ‘walk 
mournfully before the Lord of hosts,’ because they 
feel the time to be out of joint; to the ‘meek,’ to those 
who care for ‘righteousness,’ the life of personal and 
corporate obedience, to those who practise charitable 


Jesus and the Pharisees 43 


judgment, who with single-minded devotion seek the 
vision of God. Such men and women are already the 
‘salt of society’; like the town on the hill-top, they are 
noticed and wondered at by everybody.” In every 
phrase contained in this part of the Sermon Jesus has 
before Him the kind of people I have been trying to 
describe. The whole Gentile world was watching the 
“Israelite indeed,” for he was by himself in that busy 
world; persecuted, disliked, slandered as he was, men 
knew in their hearts that he was the best and soundest 
man to be found anywhere in those days. 

Little circles of men and women who live to them- 
selves tend to become unduly self-conscious and su- 
perior. Either they shrink more and more from con- 
tact with the world outside and so hide their light, or 
else they get into the habit of posing; knowing what 
is expected of them, they become morbidly conscious 
that they are being watched and discussed, and learn 
to look for the applause, or at least the interest of 
people to whom unusual piety or strictness of life pro- 
vides a novel sensation. They must learn, says Jesus, 
that no virtue is of any use, unless it helps “all who 
are in the house,” all, that is, who come within the 
range of its influence—to believe in God and goodness; 
but they must also beware of the other and greater 
danger, that of following the way of life to which 
they have committed themselves with an eye to human 
appreciation. When they become uneasily, or perhaps 
even complacently, conscious of the fact that they are 
different from others, or begin to be over-aware of 
their superiority themselves, all the goodness goes out 
of what they do from God’s point of view, and His is 


44, The Realism of Jesus 


the only verdict that really matters. These are indeed 
the characteristic defects of Puritan religion, and both 
tendencies can be traced to the same source, the self- 
consciousness which breeds shyness or professionalism, 
which makes men shrink altogether from publicity or 
court it too eagerly. In Our Lord’s recognition of 
these dangers we can see the beginnings of His aliena- 
tion from all but a few of the Pharisees, with whom 
at the outset of His Galilean ministry He declared 
Himself to have so much in common. | 

A very marked feature of modern life both inside 
and outside the Churches is the increase in the number 
of fellowships, groups of people bound together by a 
common interest, and developing an organised corpo- 
rate life separate from those who do not share the 
quest and the crusade for which they exist. This is 
all to the good, for it proves that at least some men 
and women are beginning to care so intensely for their 
spiritual and social ideals that they feel that they must 
express their enthusiasm in some new and more em- 
phatic way. Moreover the very idea of fellowship is 
being born again in our days, and we are finding out 
afresh all that we can do for one another and for our- 
selves by thinking and working and praying together. 
But if we begin to dwell more and more upon the 
comparative coldness and indifference of those who re- 
main outside our fellowship, if we let ourselves grow 
over-critical or contemptuous of those to whom our 
way of thinking does not appeal, the poison of that 
Pharisaism which Jesus so sternly denounced has al- 
ready worked its way into our fellowship; it has be- 
come a mere party, the kind of religious club with 


Jesus and the Pharisees Ad 


which Jesus would have nothing to do. We are no 
use at all unless whatever we have learnt is put at the 
disposal of all who are in the house, without parade of 
the fact that we have discovered it, or that they have 
not; unless we are able to work it out in deeds so ob- 
viously right and Christian that those who see them 
may be impressed not so much by the fact that we have 
done them as by the faith and life that made them 
possible. Unless our attitude is really right to our 
fellow-Christians who do not yet see eye to eye with 
us, Our quest for the secret of power will be in vain; 
if we bring our gift to the altar, and there remember 
that they can allege against us any impatience or aloof- 
ness or scorn, our first act of consecration to the new 
life must be to go and make friends with our reaction- 
ary brother, then come and offer the gift. There is 
a way of bearing witness to blessing received in a 
fellowship which other Christians have not cared to 
enter which only provokes and irritates those who have 
not shared our experience. We are not to speak as 
though the new truth or the enhanced power was our 
discovery or the patent of our group. We are, says 
Jesus, to find out some way of expressing what has 
been given to us that will call attention not to the fact 
that everybody else does not do the same, but that this 
is just the natural thing which every Christian can do, 
whether he belongs to our special group or not. Fur- 
ther consideration of the other danger—that of posing 
for effect or professionalism—must be left to a later 
chapter. 


V 
The Breach with the Pharisees 


WE have seen that Jesus had much in common with 
the Pharisees as He entered upon His work, and that 
sn the first detailed account of His programme He 
appealed to the rank and file of that party. They held 
the doctrine of the Fatherly providence of God as He 
did, though He gave to the idea a far wider range. 
One of their teachers said, “Not a bird perishes apart 
from Heaven,” and ‘“There is no forgetfulness before 
the Throne of His Majesty.” They also believed in 
the freedom of the will and in the Resurrection. All 
the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer find a parallel some- 
where in the maze of the rabbinic writings. Their 
whole theory of life was that of the 119th Psalm; the 
law, they would tell us, is no burden, for the greater 
the number of commandments, the less room there is 
for misunderstanding of the Father’s will, in perfect 
obedience to which lies the secret of peace. They 
looked, as Jesus did, for a kingdom of righteousness, 
in which God’s will should be done on earth, as in 
Heaven. Into the service of His campaign He called 
all their great watchwords, “the poor,” “the meek,” 
“righteousness,” “peace-makers,” “the Kingdom,” “the 
Heavenly Father.” Even His humanitarian teaching 
about Sabbath observance finds its echo in the saying 
46 


The Breach with the Pharisees 47 


reported from Hillel: “To you is the Sabbath given 
over, and you are not given over to the Sabbath.’ 
There were, we may be sure, many scribes who, like 
the eager and responsive questioner in Mark xii, were 
“not far from the Kingdom of God.” The “golden 
rule” itself occurs in rabbinic writings, as in the book 
of Tobit, in the form, “What you would not have other 
men do to you, do not to others.” 

Of course, points of difference are at least equally 
numerous, and perhaps more important—but the great 
difference is one of atmosphere, of spirit. This may be 
illustrated by the help of a well-known rabbinic parable 
about labourers in a vineyard. One young workman 
works only for one hour, and yet is paid, like those 
who came in last in corresponding parable of Jesus, 
as much as the others, who have borne the burden 
and heat of the day. The other labourers grumble, 
and are told that the man they are jealous of has done 
as much work in one hour as they in the whole day; 
the story finds its raison d’étre in the premature death 
of a promising young Rabbi. The whole point of the 
parable in the Gospel is that the men who worked but 
one hour did not earn their pay; they entered the vine- 
yard without stopping to ask questions about wages 
at all, perhaps because they were so much surprised that 
they of all people in the world should be wanted, that 
they were inside the gate and at work before they knew 
what they were doing. All over the writings of the 
Rabbis lies the trail of the bargaining spirit; so much 
obedience, so much happiness here, so much reward 
hereafter. 

It may be said that Jesus also spoke of reward con- 


48 The Realism of Jesus 


tinually. He used such phrases as “treasure in heaven” 
and “what reward have ye?” The difference is sug- 
gested by the parable just quoted ; the reward He offers 
does not consist in being singled out from less meri- 
torious performers for special honour, rather in being 
admitted along with other faithful people into the fel- 
lowship of His presence and His triumph, to a com- 
mon entrance into the “joy of the Lord.” There are 
sayings, it is true, which suggest special reward for 
specially selected people; the disciples are to “sit on 
thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel,” and even 
in the Kingdom of Heaven there are to be greatest and 
least ; one slave is to have five cities, another only two. 
In any conceivable world-order responsible positions 
of trust and authority must be given to those best fitted 
to undertake them; and in these cases the reward, if 
reward it really is, is out of all proportion to_any pos- 
sible merit. When we have done our best we are to 
say: “We are slaves; we have only done our duty.” 
The idea of keeping a kind of credit, account with God 
is simply laughed out of court. Sometimes the Rabbis 
suggest the same thing, only they go further; one of 
them, for example, said, “The reward of a precept iS 
a precept’”—but this is too cold a rule for men to live 
by. Jesus knew that we need to work for something 
else than the mere joy of working. We are to say 
“We are slaves,” for to be slaves in such a service is 
reward enough to go on with at any rate. He says 
“You are My friends,’ because He knows that only 
a real partnership with such a Master as He can satisfy 
those deeper instincts which called us into His service. 
It was not when those first followers of His had fin- 


OE a 


See 


—— 


The Breach with the Pharisees 49 


ished their task that He called them His “friends” ; 
they became for ever His friends not because they put 
themselves at His disposal, but because He put Him- 
self altogether at theirs. Any thought of services 
rendered is swept away when the Master dies for His 
servants. 

We are now in a position to define more exactly in 
what the difference between Jesus and the Pharisees 
consisted. The weakness of all Pharisaic religion lies 
in the fact that it is founded not upon love—and by 
love is here meant loyal devotion to a person—but upon 
duty, or devotion to an idea. The Pharisee might reply 
to this assertion by saying that his ideal was devotion 
to a person, and his answer would cover a real truth. 
All the same, there is an unmistakable difference of 
emphasis, and in these matters emphasis counts for a 
great deal. For practical purposes, to the Pharisee the 
one supreme and final revelation of God was in a book ; 
his devotion to the book separated him from all the 
nations of the earth, and also from “the people of the 
land,” the uninstructed careless crowds of his own 
countrymen. For him the religious life depended upon 
knowledge, for if right conduct can only come by 
conscious obedience, and the commands of God are 
many and intricate, how can the unlettered or stupid 
man obey what he does not know or cannot under- 
stand? With the best will in the world, the man who 
had not leisure or capacity to become learned in the 
law could never be a saint. It is true that the Rabbis 
said a good deal about the relative importance of 
“light” and “weighty” commands, but in theory all 
precepts were alike, for all alike expressed the will of 


50 The Realism of Jesus 


God. They also said that the whole of the Torah 
could be summed up in the two greatest of them all, 
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God . . .” and “Thou 
shalt love thy neighbour”; but if we asked them how 
you were to love God they could only say “By fulfilling 
His commands,” and that brings us back, of course, to 
our starting-point. 

Thus it was that the peasant-class in which Jesus 
was born came to be regarded as negligible for the pur- 
poses of religion. They were taught as much as they 
could take in, in school and synagogue, but they were 
despised and given to understand that they need not 
aspire to honour in the Church. The strict Pharisee 
would not eat with them, any more than he would with 
publicans or Gentiles, lest he should be betrayed into 
forgetting any one of the many regulations governing 
his diet and his manners at table. Self-conscious ex- 
perts are tiresome people at any time, but specialists in 
religion, men who profess to exude inspired wisdom, 
soon become snobs of the most obnoxious kind. With 
all their affectation of humility, their deferential quota- 
tion of the dicta of older authorities upon disputed 
points in exposition, the scribes must have strutted 
about with the consciousness that they were the people 
who knew all that was best worth knowing. Some 
of them might deserve to be called “the salt of society” ; 
as a class they had grown heavy and sour and useless, 
because they felt themselves to be indispensable. Into 
their deferential and comfortable world Jesus broke 
with His unanswerable common-sense, and they knew 
by instinct that until this disturbing presence was re- 
moved they could never get back to the kind of life, 


The Breach with the Pharisees 51 


so flattering to their self-importance, that had once 
taken up all their thoughts. If the whole will of God 
is written in a book, you can become an expert, for it 
is only a matter of brains, time, and trouble; to have 
the brains and the time and to be willing to take the 
trouble marks you out at once from those who are less 
fortunate or industrious. But if religion is concerned 
with love to a person, there is no limit to duty, and 
there can be no question of merit. Where we truly 
love, the idea of merit never comes into our thoughts 
at all, though the idea of reward, the return and ex- 
change of love, does. Still we never think that we have 
deserved the return, we only know that we can never 
be content without it. Jesus speaks often of a reward, 
never of deserving it. 

If the Pharisee had no dealings with “the people of 
the land” except from the pulpit on the Sabbath, still 
less could he consort with publicans and Gentiles; he 
classed the two together. If the publican or the harlot 
repented, forgiveness was promised. But the sinner 
must come to the saint, the saint could not go after the 
sinner; his virtue was too hardly won and too easily 
lost to be risked in dubious company. We do not 
always realise how utterly radical Jesus was; Pharisaic 
religion is based upon a series of distinctions, all of 
which He undermined. A chosen people, an infallible 
book, one sacred day, one sex specially qualified for 
sacramental functions, one spiritual aristocracy, these 
walls of partition all went down before Him. These 
ideas are rife in the Church still, for Judaism springs 
eternal in the human breast. All the real heresies as 
well as all the abuses that have obstructed the progress 


52 The Realism of Jesus 


of the Kingdom through the centuries can indeed be 
traced back to those elements in human nature which 
Pharisaism represents. Romanism, Puritanism of the 
hard kind, Spiritualism, the narrow orthodoxy of some 
and the self-confident theorising of others in the mod- 
ern Church, along with Islam outside, are all directly 
or indirectly descended from rabbinical Pharisaism; 
Judaism is the enemy, because it is always the second 
best, for religiously-inclined people the one alternative 
to Christianity. 


VI 
The Beatitudes 


Tue word “blessed” has little or no meaning for us, 
because it has become a technical term of the religious 
life. One of our greatest handicaps in the interpre- 
tation of the New Testament lies in the fact that we 
have not yet discovered how to express the realities 
of the spiritual life in the realistic language of the peo- 
ple. We have to deal with a generation that has never 
learnt to attach a definite meaning to historic Christian 
phrases; one of our most urgent tasks is that of trans- 
lation, or rather paraphrase, for word-by-word trans- 
lation is impossible, if it is to be really translation. 
“Happy” will not do as a substitute for “blessed,” for 
to men of our age “happiness” means something quite 
different from the “‘blessedness” of which Jesus spoke. 
What is apparently meant is “to be congratulated upon 
their prospects”; the men and women described in the 
sentences which begin with this word are likely candi- 
dates for the Kingdom, as the “rich’’ and “well-fed,” 
“the strong, the easy, and the glad” are not. 

Perhaps enough has been said in a previous chapter 
as to the nature of this first constituency of Jesus; 
only a little more detailed exposition is here necessary. 
They were lowly folk who felt themselves out of touch 
with the restless life about them. Their tendency was 

53 


54 The Realism of Jesus 


to shut themselves up with their dreams of the “King- 
dom,” to live among like-minded associates, to let 
the foolish world, “the giddy multitude,” as our fathers 
used to say in their prayers, go by. The word “meek” 
is specially difficult to render in modern speech, for it 
has a wealth of meaning. In the Old Testament it 
seems to mean “humble”; in the New it is applied to 
Himself by Jesus in close connexion with another 
phrase translated in our versions “lowly in heart,” but 
perhaps more adequately rendered “of homely mind,” 
“easy to get on with.” In the Bible when two epithets 
are joined by “and,” it will be found very often that 
each explains the other. “Unassuming” or “ready to. 
make allowances’ gives us one side of the meaning 
of the word, “‘patiently persistent” the other. It should 
be noticed that they are “to inherit the earth”; that is, 
to fall heirs to the lordship of human life. They are 
men who, with great ends in view, are willing to give 
way and make allowances in matters of smaller 
moment ; they have that rare faculty, the ability to dis- 
tinguish trifles from what is of serious importance, 
All quarrelsome people justify themselves on the 
ground that the thing is a question of principle with 
them; the meek man knows by instinct where he must 
fight and where he can safely yield ground. It may 
be claimed that “meekness” in this sense of the word 
has proved the secret of such success as we have had 
as an imperial power, as it certainly helped the Roman 
empire to hold the nations of the world together for 
so many centuries. Where we have known how to give 
way, as in South Africa, we have built up our empire; 
where we have been unyielding, as in the war with our 


The Beatitudes 55 


American colonies in the eighteenth century, and in 
so much of our dealings with Ireland in this, we have 
failed disastrously. 

“Righteousness” in the next verse means conformity 
to the will of God in social as well as in individual 
life, and “merciful” carries the sense of “brotherly” 
rather than “pitiful.” The Gospel idea of “mercy” is 
not that of the compassionate condescension of a su- 
perior to one beneath him, rather than of esprit de 
corps, of the spirit which Sir G. A. Smith calls “leal 
love.” The phrase “the pure in heart” just hints a 
contrast with the stress upon ceremonial purity in the 
religious life of all Pharisees; the side reference to the 
story of Jacob, the man who was first called “Israel,” 
because he saw God face to face, has been dealt with 
already. “Heart,” it should be observed, should be 
translated “mind” in our current speech; the “pure in 
heart” not only live and look for the vision of God, 
but are so much absorbed in their quest that they desire 
nothing else, they are set free from the hindrance of 
competing motives, unlike the rest of us, who want so 
many things at the same time that we never really get 
anything. The word “peace-makers,’ as I have sug- 
gested already, contains an allusion to the pacifist 
tendencies of the Pharisees, but it also has a deeper 
meaning; the “peacemakers” are those who seek to 
call their fellows away from the distraction of the 
desires which divide them and set them against one 
another, that they may be free from the crusade which 
unites us all. It is interesting to notice that “the 
Peace” was one of the common half-superstitious eva- 
sions of the name of God; a “son of peace” (compare 


56 The Realism of Jesus 


the phrase in Luke x, 6) would be a “son of God,” 
and so he is, says Jesus, in more senses than one. By 
and by the peacemakers will be recognised for what 
they are, God’s men in the world, as reconciling is 
God’s work; He “was in Christ, reconciling the world 
to Himself.” 

Fach of the Beatitudes, it will be seen, leads us one 
step higher on the steep road of spiritual attainment. 
We begin with humility and a “divine discontent,”’ we 
pass on to forbearance with others coupled with con- 
centrated aspiration after an ideal always clearly vis- 
ualised and always beyond us. From the clear view 
of the ideal and the concentration of soul-hunger upon 
it, springs a new consciousness of brotherhood with 
all men—for the range of spiritual vision broadens as 
we ascend. The summit once reached in the sight of 
God’s face, our work in life lies clear before us; it is 
to do God’s work of reconciling men to Him, and each 
other, and the consequence is persecution, but a perse- 
cution which should be our delight because it is borne 
for the sake of an ideal now realised in Christ, and is 
our guarantee of a place in the apostolic succession of 
persecuted people. Another way of taking the Beati- 
tudes is equally illuminating. They run in pairs, the 
first member of each pair describing a virtue from the 
point of view of the secret life of the soul with God, 
the second its expression in social relations. This is 
true of all except the third (“Blessed are the meek’) 
and the last (“the persecuted”’) ; these summarise what 
has gone before. If you are lowly-minded and ill at 
ease in the world, you will be ready to make allow- 
ances and will be content to wait. If you have attained 


The Beatitudes 57 


to the vision of God and (consequently ) live to make 
peace, you will be persecuted. Reading the rest of the 
Beatitudes in this way, we see at once that the discon- 
tent praised in the second is the outward side of the 
poverty of spirit, the consciousness of weakness in the 
spiritual life, which is the subject of the first. The 
sense of brotherhood is the working out of the concen- 
trated aspiration after the new world seen from afar; 
the desire to call men from issues of less moment to 
share our experience of God in Jesus comes when we 
have reached the top of the mountain and look down on 
the conflict in the plain below. Persecution “‘for right- 
eousness’ sake” is the result of the quest which has 
thus become a crusade, and is to be exultantly welcomed 
not as the penalty but as the reward of service. It is 
doubtful whether the people addressed by Jesus had 
yet suffered serious persecution for their religion, so 
He passes quickly from the past to the future, and 
from the general statement “I congratulate those who 
have ever been persecuted” to “I congratulate you, 
when men persecute and slander you for My sake.” 
Here the personal note comes in with startling sudden- 
ness, and we pass from general maxims to a tremen- 
dous claim. Loyalty to a cause has now become devo- 
tion to a Person. 

It will have been noticed that the link which holds 
the Beatitudes together can be found in the fact that 
they are all blessings upon a particular kind of discon- 
tent. The people described here as likely candidates 
for the new age are men and women who cherish an 
ideal perpetually challenged by the world in which they 
live as well as by some of their own less noble moods. 


58 The Realism of Jesus 


Such men are all to themselves, the salt of society and 
the light of the world because they are different. The 
constant pressure of public opinion, together with those 
darker moods common to men of a sensitive tempera- 
ment, is bound to have its effect upon them as the years 
go by; how serious its depressing influence upon the 
best of the Pharisees came to be is shown by the books 
written by such men in the next generation. “Out of 
all the trees of the earth,’ complains one of them, 
“Thou hast chosen Thee one vine . . . out of all the 
peoples that have become so many hast Thou gotten 
Thee one people . . . and bestowed upon it Thy law 

. if the world has been created for our sakes, why 
do we not enter into possession of our world?” Dis- 
illusioned and out of love with their times these men 
soon shut themselves up with their somewhat forlorn 
and precarious hope. “For the youth of the world is 
past, and the strength of creation already exhausted 

. and the pitcher is near to the cistern and the ship 
to the harbour, and the course of the journey to the 
city, and life to its consummation.’ They needed the 
assurance that the true light was already shining, some 
visible certainty that the world could be redeemed. 
This new confidence the coming of Jesus was meant 
to give them; if they could but see it, He was their 
ideal incarnate. All that they need do, He says, is to 
add to their creed a glad loyalty to Him and they 
would enter into “the treasure of an inward Heaven,” 
the “Kingdom that could not be shaken,” a sudden 
realisation of their age-long dream in actual workaday 
experience. Meanwhile they must strive to make the 
ideal available for the whole community in which they 


The Beatitudes — 59 


lived, no longer keeping their brotherly forbearance 
and charity to the members of their own group; they 
must make it tell for all it was worth upon the world 
about them, for when He came the Kingdom had come 
with Him into the common life of men; their solitary 
quest is to become a triumphant crusade. 

Nowadays, too, we have our idealists, self-denying 
and earnest people who stand, in face of endless dis- 
couragement, for the Kingdom, though they express 
their ideas of Utopia in different language; they dream 
chiefly of social regeneration, but their inspiration is 
in essence religious. The whole form and pressure of 
the age is against them, and they tend to become some- 
what fretful and petulant. Idealism cannot live with- 
out hope, and there can be no real hope outlasting 
youthful optimism and exuberance without Him who 
is the Kingdom incarnate. The very power to believe 
in the possibility of the ideal is being gradually worn 
away in the minds of many of the best people of to-day, 
because they have only their own convictions to fall 
back upon. They are always in the opposition, and 
seem so often to be on the losing side that they become 
intolerant and sometimes very bitter. Such intolerance 
is the one thing most calculated to make an ideal, which 
would be unpalatable anyhow, quite certain to fail in 
its appeal; when men can charge us with faults of 
temper and can call us Pharisees with any degree of 
truth, we put a weapon into their hands more deadly 
than any they can forge for themselves. Jesus, who 
gave Himself to the fellowship of men who did not 
understand Him and could not share His inner life, 
yet carried the light unshadowed through the darkness 


60 The Realism of Jesus 


around and before Him to the conquest of an unbe- 
lieving world, because He was and is “the Word made 
flesh,’ can teach us how to believe in, to bear with 
and to love those who are unresponsive to our. message. 

Something remains to’be said about the imagery of 
these verses. Salt had two chief uses in the domestic 
life from which Jesus so often took His illustrations. 
It was first “pure, then peaceable”; in other words, it 
was employed to keep things from going bad, and as 
a condiment in cookery. Much of the salt used then, 
specially that which was brought from the Jordan val- 
ley and the Dead Sea, was bituminous and of inferior 
quality, liable to lose its preserving power, to become 
heavy and sour. <A heretic was described by the Rabbis 
as one who “cooked his food without salt’; salt in 
that phrase corresponds to the saving common-sense 
which keeps men and societies together. In the peas- 
ant-home from which Jesus came the dimly-lighted 
room would only seem home-like when the lamp was 
brought in. Another memory of His boyhood would 
be that of the village which had been His home so long 
perched high on the hill-side, a landmark in all 
weathers, by which men steered their course over the 
hills, Like the lamp in the cottage that never quite 
goes out the night through, like the town on the crest 
of the hill which serves as a guide to travellers at all 
seasons of the year, we are to let our light shine out 
so that men may find it less difficult to believe in God, 
themselves, and each other because they have crossed 
our path. 7 


VII 
The Old Religion and the New 


THERE was one fundamental question which any 
Jewish teacher had to answer ; what was his relation to 
the old religion? Jesus deals with this delicate sub- 
ject with complete candour. We must not allow our- 
selves to be swept by our dislike of some of the forms 
in which the old religion found expression into disre- 
gard of His plain statement. He was “not come,” 
He said, “to destroy the old religion.” It was God- 
given ; not merely its great declarations, but what might 
seem comparatively unimportant details carry an eter- 
nal meaning. No affirmation could have been more 
satisfactory to His listeners then, scarcely any more 
embarrassing to many progressive people now. But 
His explicit pronouncement cannot be explained away, 
and indeed cannot be attributed to the conservative 
prejudice of the evangelist, for it is probable that the 
saying contained in v. 19 was also to be found in the 
original draft of the Third as well as the First Gospel; 
it was removed by the father of all “higher” critics, 
Marcion. Jesus makes haste to add that His interpre- 
tation of the moral law revealed in Scripture is to go 
far beyond that propounded by their leaders, the 
Scribes of the Pharisaic party. 


We may argue with some force, if we will, that 
61 


62 The Realism of Jesus 


whatever the intention of Jesus may have been, as a 
matter of fact the new law has displaced the old; He 
Himself said that no one can with impunity sew a 
patch of new cloth on to an old garment. What did 
Jesus mean by the law? Not everything in the first 
books of the Bible certainly, for He abrogates some 
of the provisions of the law of Moses in several cases 
by implication, in one case at least—that which con- 
cerns divorce—in so many words. We heed not 
assume that, because to a Jew of the first century “the 
law” meant everything in the Pentateuch, it was so 
for Jesus. Indeed, as we shall see, He contents Him- 
self in the sequel with showing how the five basal 
principles of the law receive a larger interpretation 
in His programme. The point is that He claims to do 
what the scribes also sought to accomplish, to “fulfil 
the law and the prophets,” that is to declare their hid- 
den meaning. If He seems to substitute loyalty to 
Himself for loyalty to the book, it is not really a sub- 
stitution, for He is the subject of the book—‘‘Moses 
wrote of Me.’ When the early Christians sought 
everywhere in the Old Testament for “testimonies” to — 
the Christ, some of their findings may seem to us to 
be far-fetched and remote from the intent of the 
original writers, but they were following His lead; 
they were right in principle, though we may think that 
they carried the theory to grotesque lengths. 

Jesus proceeds to give five examples of Mis method 
of treatment, choosing for this purpose the five great 
principles underlying the law of Moses and interpreting 
them afresh. The first illustration chosen concerns the 
principle of the sacredness of human life embodied in 


The Old Religion and the New 63 


the sixth commandment, ‘‘Thou shalt not kill.” The 
scribes, following the precedent set in the law, allowed 
the possibility of justifiable homicide in certain circum- 
stances, and added “‘But whoever kills must stand his 
trial.” “TI go further,” says Jesus, “and say, Whoever 
persists in unreasonable anger’—an anger he cannot 
justify in the sight of God—‘“must stand his trial.” 
The words “without a cause,’ omitted in the Revised 
Version, should come back into our text, as they have 
been strongly confirmed by such textual evidence as has 
come to light since 1881. Jesus is here speaking of 
our unreasoning antipathies, of our dislike for the peo- 
ple who irritate us merely by going on being them- 
selves. An anger that cannot explain or justify itself 
is not just the outcome of incompatibility of tempera - 
ment; it is an offence against personality, for the 
person to whom we consider ourselves antipathetic has 
just as much right to be himself as we have; it is an 
outrage upon the soul, as attempted murder is an out- 
rage upon the body; in God’s code of justice these mis- 
demeanours are classed together. “Whoever says to 
his brother, ‘Rach’ ” (perhaps a snobbish colloquialism 
applied to the “lower classes’) “shall be tried on a 
charge of blasphemy.” Anger is a sin against man 
primarily, contempt a sin against God. Justifiable con- 
tempt is indeed conceivable, but upon the man who 
shows scorn of his brother lies the onus of proving his 
case, and the charge is a serious one; he, not the man 
he chooses to despise, is on his trial. The third word, 
somewhat tamely translated in our versions “Thou 
fool,” stands for downright abuse, and all abuse is pro- 
fane. The man who allows anger and contempt to 


64 The Realism of Jesus 


carry him into personal invective stands self-con- 
demned. God can no more allow such offences against 
men’s kinship to one another and their common rela- 
tion to Him to go unchallenged than any community 
can pass over murder. 

So far Jesus has been dealing with our feelings for 
or against one another; now He passes to the other 
side of the question—our knowledge of their feelings 
towards us. Throughout the Sermon He tells us in 
many different ways that our relations with God and 
one another are interlocked. Here He declares that we 
cannot find God until we have made an honest effort 
to come to terms with any “brother” with whom we 
have, for one reason or another, lost contact. If 
another man thinks he can charge us with any mani- 
festation of dislike or contempt, with any neglect of 
his grievance, whether there is anything in his com- 
plaint or not, we are not to say scornfully that he has 
a “‘bee in his bonnet,” but are to make an effort to find 
common ground with him, to give a courteous hearing 
to all that he cares to allege against us. Perhaps this 
is the source of the “seeming unreality of the spiritual 
life,’ so characteristic and apparently so incurable a 
trouble in the modern Church; before we can “‘get right 
with God” we must be willing to leave no stone un- 
turned to get right with men. If we want proof that 
lack of fellowship with those who are about us hinders 
prayer, we need only to turn to Gethsemane; when 
Jesus lost us, when all His human relationships seemed 
to be out of gear, even He found it an agony to pray, 
though all the fault was on our side, not His. There 
is something else to be said here, but it will be best to 


The Old Religion and the New 65 


leave it till we have surveyed the whole of the ground 
covered by the Sermon; everything in the three chap- 
ters leads up by one way or another to the Cross. 

In general, Jesus goes on to say, never leave a differ- 
ence with another man unresolved, when there is the 
slightest chance of coming to an understanding. To 
take an extreme case: you find yourself involved in a 
lawsuit, and are actually on the way to court when you 
meet your opponent going there too; you ought to be 
able to discover some way out, while you are walking 
together the short distance left before you get there. 
The natural thing for most of us to do, if on that day 
of all days we saw the man who was causing all the 
trouble coming up to us, would be to turn down a side- 
street to avoid him. But obviously this accidental 
meeting gives us a last chance of avoiding a final 
breach, and all the vexation of the law’s delays. Cut 
your losses, and make it up somehow; being one of 
My disciples, you should have friendliness and inge- 
nuity enough to find some human way of approach, 
some excuse for opening a conversation. Never keep 
an enemy when you can in honesty make a friend; 
proverbial philosophy bids us “keep out of the hands 
of the lawyers; it will pay you in the long run,” and 
Jesus is always on the side of common-sense. But 
with Him this is the main point; the man who bears 
ill-will always pays, and to the last penny too; however 
much he may be in the right when the quarrel begins, 
his persistence, after there has been offered a chance of 
settlement, results in the transference of the case to a 
higher tribunal, to a court in which the party chiefly re- 
sponsible for its continuance stands in the dock and is 


66 The Realism of Jesus 


cast into the prison-cell of his own unforgiving ran- 
cour. Jesus does not mean, here or elsewhere, that 
God casts a man into a hell made for him, but that he 
makes hell for himself; by and by he is locked up with 
himself for company, he becomes his own chief tor- 
mentor. I remember a case which came under my 
notice early in my ministry, which casts a lurid light on 
the warning given here. A man left his Church with 
a grievance; he told me the story in later days, and, 
so far as I could judge, he had been grievously 
wronged. For twenty years he sat at home on Sundays 
wearily going over the points of the dispute. His chil- 
dren went wrong one after the other, his home was 
broken up, and he came back a man old before his time; 
he told me that he had paid up to the last penny, and, 
so far as I could tell from his story, he had been at 
least more in the right to start with than the other man. 
We should notice, before we leave this verse, a sug- 
gestion which recurs over and over again in the Ser- 
mon, that of the exuberant and triumphant friendli- 
ness of the true disciple; he can make friends in record 
tume. Underlying the passage there is the idea that, if 
only men can come together as men, not in an official 
capacity or as representatives of a party, a way of 
peace is always discoverable, if they use the brains and 
the natural good humour which God has given them. 
We have sacrificed human nature to machinery and 
organisation, with the result that our relations have 
become so complicated that we cannot really settle any- 
thing; the one thing needful is that we should some- 
how restore the human relation. 


VIII 
Sex-Relations 


AT this point Jesus passes from the Sixth to the 
Seventh commandment, and this provides Him with 
the second of His illustrations. The underlying prin- 
ciple here is the sacredness of home life and specially 
of the marriage tie. The old law forbade infringement 
by either party of the loyalty which makes married life 
possible; Jesus again lays stress upon the rights of 
personality. To “look upon” a woman merely as an 
object of desire is to wrong her, for it is a degradation 
of her personal worth. She is not an instrument of 
sex, nor even a potential wife or mother; she is not 
first of all a woman, but a human soul; sex is secon- 
dary, just as nationality is secondary—as Jesus pro- 
ceeds later on to declare—the primary reality is always 
humanity and the common human relation to the com- 
mon Father. Jesus does not brand sexual impulses 
as wrong in themselves; He does not even say, as mis- 
taken moralists have done, that the procreation of chil- 
dren is the one purpose for which men were made 
men, and women, women; He was no ascetic, still less 
was Hea eugenist. What He does assert is that the 
treatment of any particular woman as if she existed 
merely for the purposes of sex is a crime against her, 


even though such an attitude goes no further than a 
67 


68 The Realism of Jesus 


thought. Sexual intercourse is an outrage if it does 
not enrich the personal worth to themselves and to 
each other of both parties, and both parties equally. 
The whole standpoint of the modern feminist is an- 
ticipated here; as on so many subjects, Jesus has left 
nothing really new to be said. He goes on to turn the 
great idea the other way round, but in this case He 
deals with the external side of the question first. To 
be dominated by a merely animal passion, however 
natural, does not merely degrade the object of that 
passion, but is treason to a man’s own self; at any 
cost of self-mortification he must be rid of it. Better 
keep your soul, even if it means a starved and thwarted 
physical life; better deny yourself of natural pleasures 
than with all your bodily powers about you to be 
plunged into a hell—a hell of your own making—of 
never-satisfied desire. 

Such a sexual relation as has been defined, a rela- 
tion which gives free play to the personal worth of 
both parties, subordinating neither to the other, and 
never prostituting the freedom of the human spirit to 
sex, an equal partnership which makes passion a sacra- 
ment, not an end in itself, is only possible, in life as we 
know it, in Christian marriage. Jesus evidently does 
not regard marriage as His great disciple Paul seems 
sometimes to have regarded it, as a mere restraint to 
inconvenient but undeniable sexual impulses; rather 
as in itself a great fulfilment, the perfect life for normal 
people. In another place in this Gospel, He shows that 
He was fully aware that the ideal sex-relation is im- 
possible for very many of His disciples, either for 
physical or social or vocational reasons, and He con- 


Sex-Relations 69 


siders their case with very marked sympathy; it is not 
the complete life—they are “eunuchs’—but there are 
great spiritual compensations ; they lose much, but their 
loss is to be made up. Then He faces the burning 
question of divorce, and here His word is unmistakably 
clear, It is possible that even the clause which has been 
interpreted as conveying an exception should read “‘not- 
withstanding the word” (in Deut. xxiv. 1) “about mis- 
conduct before marriage.” But it should be observed 
that He is here speaking of marriage between disciples; 
a large proportion of the marriages now “solemnised”’ 
—to use what is perhaps an unhappy expression—in 
Christian Churches are not Christian in any recognis- 
able sense of the word; it is exceedingly questionable 
whether we have any right to say in such cases “Whom 
God hath joined, let not man put asunder,” and we 
should not seek to impose a law meant to apply to 
Christian marriage in a contract in which the only 
power which can make the marriage permanent has 
never so far as we can tell had a place. The honest 
thing for the Church to do is, I believe, to refuse to 
be a party to marriages except between her members, 
or those at least who are prepared to make an open 
profession of faith, and then to insist that the contract 
so entered into is not dissoluble by the default of either 
party. By so doing we should lose much popularity, 
but we should gain in self-respect, and—what is more 
important—we should be in line with the teaching of 
Jesus in regard to this most difficult of all questions. 

The Pharisaic feeling about the sex-relation is 
utterly alien from that of Jesus; the Puritan is some- 
what morbid on this subject, while Jesus is equally 


70 The Realism of Jesus 


free from prudishness and laxity. Each of these ex- » 
tremes is due to the same tendency, the tendency to 
treat her sex as the chief fact about a woman; we are 
far less inclined to think in the same way about a man. 
Some psychologists are very busy telling us that sex 
is more central and dominant in a woman than in a 
man, and indeed it may be so. But Jesus does not 
simply republish the religion of nature; for all we 
know, the very fact that one sex has through so many 
centuries been subordinated to the uses of the other 
may have caused a change of balance which is not 
really natural. The fact we have got to face is that, 
if sex is the sole purpose of woman’s existence, most 
women are in these days doomed to thwarted and un- 
natural lives. There is no such championship of the 
right of woman to an equal place in the sun in her own 
right as that of Jesus, and, if we knew the whole truth, 
we should see that He is not only nearer the ideal, but 
also nearer the real facts of the case. \For the Chris- 
tian, at least, the thing that counts is a woman’s soul; 
the salvation of the man who loves her depends upon 
his respect for what is eternal in her. « 


IX 
On Truthfulness in Speech 


Tue third illustration of His meaning given by Jesus 
is taken from the principle underlying the Third and 
Ninth commandments—that of the social duty of 
truthfulness. “Thou shalt not take the name of 
Jehovah thy God in vain” does not refer primarily to 
reverence, but to veracity, for the Oriental recognises 
no obligation to truth except when he is on his oath. 
The Ninth commandment emphasises truth as a duty 
to one’s neighbour; “speak truth every one with his 
neighbour, for we are members one of another.” No 
society can hold together for long, if we never know 
when to take each other seriously. Under the old law 
this difficulty was avoided by establishing two stand- 
ards of truth. In business contracts and covenants of 
alliance, in statements made in a court of law, special 
impressiveness was given by the mention of God’s 
name. When religious opinion became more sensitive 
about the mention of the name of Jehovah, other 
phrases, such as “by heaven,” “by earth,’ “by my 
head,’ were employed to carry conviction; or the 
speaker turned towards Jerusalem, the city of the 
“Shekinah,” by his gesture calling God, who dwelt 
there, to witness to the truth of his assertions. The 
consequence was that no one attached any importance 
VL 


72 The Realism of Jesus 


to any statement unaccompanied by an oath at all. 
Moreover the phrases used in oaths became just catch- 
words, as the Bible used in a modern law-court comes 
to be regarded as a mere convenience; men came to 
employ noble words as trade-tokens. ‘Heaven, earth, 
are great words,” says Philo, the Jewish philosopher, 
“and are therefore suitable for solemn occasions.” 
But words are not ennobled when they are made to 
serve a purpose for which they were never meant. 
Jesus had a strong sense of the dignity of speech; but 
He turns the matter the other way round. Words are 
not mere counters, but are themselves part of the reality 
of the sacred things for which they stand. “Heaven 
is God’s throne, earth the scene of His intercourse with 
men, Jerusalem the city of the greatest of all kings,” 
sacred to Jews, but how much more to Christians! 
“Your head, for the matter of that, is sacred, too,” 
for your bodies are more than garments, to be cast off 
and forgotten when outworn; every smallest detail of 
their fabric has a meaning for God, for He has fash- 
ioned them to express His idea of you—‘in Thy book 
are all my members written.” Even the words which 
have become attached to these sacred things are not 
mere labels; they also are part of our heritage, and 
must not be degraded to serve as makeweights in the 
business of buying and selling, in the thrust and parry 
of law-court pleading. 

Of course, every group of men and women with 
a separate life of its own needs a special language, 
and slang may be defended as a necessity. But we 
should not degrade good old words; rather, if we must 
make what Swift calls “a little language,” to express 


On Truthfulness in Speech 73 


ideas peculiar to our own circle, we should invent new 
words, which will pass into deserved oblivion when 
the group breaks up. The speech of our fathers is a 
sacred trust, and we must see to it that we pass it on 
to our children unspoiled for the great uses of love 
and life and death. Language changes and should 
change as fresh experience demands fresh expression ; 
but as writers and talkers we must take care that it 
becomes more worthy, as well as more expressive, for 
we all have a hand in its making. 

- But what is truth after all? To this question, which 
meets us as we pass from the manner to the matter of 
human speech, Jesus again answers quite clearly. For 
us, with our fragmentary and uncertain knowledge of 
ourselves and the world we live in, “truth” may be 
defined as sincerity. We are to say what we mean, we 
must measure the strength of our words by the known 
strength of our convictions. But because we know 
very little about ourselves except the fact that our 
moods and opinions are for ever changing, we shall 
do well to say less than we think we mean, to err on 
the side of understatement rather than on that of 
exaggeration. 

That the warning against exaggeration, the use of 
strong words, words with blood and passion in them, 
to express hackneyed or trivial emotions or mere pass- 
ing sentiments, has to do with a matter of real social 
urgency is proved by the deplorable results of war- 
time propaganda. We have become accustomed to the 
idea of talking or writing with a purpose, of working 
up excitement for an immediate effect. When it be- 
comes a matter of policy or part of the duties of one’s 


7A The Realism of Jesus 


profession to affect strong emotion, the poison of un- 
reality, the leaven of hypocrisy, has found its way into 
our thinking. When the enemies of Jesus said He 
cast out the demons by Beelzebul the tragedy of their 
condition was that they had repeated the slander or 
at least meditated it so long that they more than half 
believed it. But the effect of the propaganda habit 
upon the mind of the public which only reads and lis- 
tens is still more disastrous. Men are so much used to 
journalistic and platform hysterics, to the loud head- 
line and partisan pleading, that it is almost impossible 
to rouse them when there is a real need for deep emo- 
tion and instant action. Many of us feel that our 
chief difficulty in these days does not lie in any reluc- 
tance to pass a Christian judgment upon public issues ; 
rather in our ignorance of the actual facts. If we 
could only be sure of the truth, we should know what 
to think and do; but can we be sure? That public 
opinion seems to be past feeling on great moral ques- 
tions is largely the result of the constant over-stimula- 
tion of the faculty of emotional response. The time 
is surely coming when there will be a reaction to sim- 
plicity of speech; even now, amid all the special plead- 
ing, a man with a straightforward message delivered 
in plain speech is sure of a hearing, if only because he 
is so different from the others. 

This saying bears also upon the habit of playful 
exaggeration in private talk. Jesus was never afraid 
of hyperbole, but His exaggerations, like highly- 
coloured pictures, are meant to stamp an impression 
which had to be conveyed somehow to minds duller 
than His own; they were forcible expressions of truth 


On Truthfulness in Speech 75 


which can never be stated too strongly. Our exag- 
gerations more often spring from a perverted sense of 
humour or looseness of mental fibre, Language is an 
instrument of self-expression upon which issues of 
great personal and social importance may at any time 
come to depend. If we are perpetually playing with 
truth, we blunt the tool upon the effectiveness of which 
we must in the last resort rely if we are to be believed, 
when we need desperately to make ourselves under- 
stood, and understood quickly. There are many men 
who have the utmost difficulty in persuading their 
friends that for once they really mean what they say. 
“If you want to say a thing strongly,” says Jesus, “say 
it twice over”; emphasis is to lie in the absence of 
ambiguity. When you begin to refine and adorn, you 
weaken the effect of what you say. When you are 
clever enough to say a thing in such a way as to pro- 
vide a means of escape, if it suits your convenience 
later on, just as when you think rather of the effective- 
ness of your manner than of the strength of your 
conviction, you are giving the devil his chance to poison 
the simpleness and truth which is in you with the leaven 
of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. 


x 
On True Justice 


TruTH in action is justice, and Jesus proceeds to de- 
clare Himself upon this vexed and difficult question. 
The old rough law of justice is summed up in the 
words “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth” ; much as we may 
dislike the somewhat brutal crudeness of the phrases 
used, we must remind ourselves again that Jesus had 
begun by saying “I am not come to destroy the old 
religion.” The sentence “Eye for eye, tooth tor tooth” 
expresses in rough and ready fashion the necessity for 
the exaction of adequate compensation for serious 
injury, the only available safeguard for the security 
of any ordered life. Nothing is said here about com 
pensation for damage to property, for that is settled 
upon another basis. In the context of this saying 
Polycarp has the phrase “fist for fist” or “slap for 
slap” ; this phrase should perhaps be restored, as Jesus 
goes on to talk about slapping—the full text in the 
Old Testament ends with “bruising for bruising.” 
The Rabbis interpreted this text as allowing reé- 
prisals. Jesus replies that to take the law into your 
own hands, to act as judge and jury in your own case 
is not justice, but revenge, its opposite. The old law 
was enacted to limit and restrain private revenge; pun- 


ishment is only allowed when carried out by a properly 
76 


On True Justice 77 


qualified court. The phrase “official reprisals” is a 
contradiction in terms, for government has abdicated 
the functions of government when it allows them; it 
has become a well-armed and highly-organised bully. 

But for most of us, as for the people to whom Jesus 
was speaking, the real difficulty consists not in discus- 
sions as to the necessity of state-justice, but in the 
hundred and one complexities of our private relation- 
ships. Jesus takes three cases: one in which the matter 
at issue is not serious enough to be taken into the 
courts; the second in which it has been taken there by 
the other party, and there has been a miscarriage of 
justice; the last in which the normal processes of jus- 
tice have been suspended by what is called by another 
contradiction in terms, martial law. In each case the 
“just” thing to do is to restore the right human rela- 
tionship, the only terms upon which men can live to- 
gether for long, by such a surrender of personal rights 
as may balance the exaction, and make the social atmos- 
phere wholesome again. When we consider how many 
allowances have daily to be made for us by people 
better than ourselves, if we are to carry on the busi- 
ness of life at all, we realise that the only fair treatment 
of each other is a generous and forbearing refusal to 
insist upon our rights in small matters. If we had our 
rights we should be in some hell of our own making, 
whereas the love and patience of other people have 
made a heaven into which none of us could pass on 
his own merits. ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’ is no bad 
rule in this department of life as in others. 

The blow on the right cheek, or rather the right side 
of the neck, according to rabbinic phraseology, repre- 


78 The Realism of Jesus 


sents an insult, equivalent to the more modern and 
dangerous custom of boxing the ears. The “rapisma,” 
as it was called, was not an injury; it was worse, the 
Rabbis said, because while an injury hurt your body, 


the insult of this contemptuous flick with the back or 


side of the hand outraged your feelings. On the other 
hand the body feels what it must, the mind only what 
it chooses to feel; an insult’s power to sting depends 
not upon the wish or the ability of another to hurt you, 
but upon your willingness to feel hurt. But all justice 
has in view, not only the restoration of a right human 
atmosphere in which men can live together with toler- 
able security, but also the prevention by discourage- 
ment of the will to wound the feelings of a brother- 
man. This can best be brought about by ignoring the 
insult, for rudeness soon tires if it is not noticed ; it 
lives by seeing itself resented. 

Our Lord’s second instance deals with what would 
seem to be a more serious matter. The case has been 
taken into court, and the Christian has to pay damages, 
for the verdict has gone against him. He is a poor 
man involved, let us say, by a rich money-lender, and 
his situation is one for which there was no redress in 
the law of the time. So he finds himself in what we 
should call an intolerably humiliating position, for his 
only property which can be turned into cash consists 
of the clothes on his back. He forfeits his under-gar- 
ment, the absence of which would not be noticed in 
public. How is he at once to redeem a thoroughly 
sordid and unjust situation, and at the same time make 
future oppression impossible? He strips himself of 
his one remaining garment, and hands it to his victor- 


On True Justice 79 


ious opponent as a present! Obviously this is one of 
the humorous fancies which Jesus relished so much, 
but it is difficult to see what other course of action 
the injured party could take which would be half so 
effective in putting a stop to this kind of thing. The 
natural human relation of giving and taking is re- 
stored, and you cannot go on persecuting, for such 
people are quite irrepressible. 

The third case is also one in which there is no redress 
for the unoffending sufferer; though his plight is not 
so desperate as that of the man just described, it is 
sufficiently grave in a country where armed bands of 
his own people are about. He is “conscripted” to carry 
despatches one mile along the Roman road by a peremp- 
tory military official. At the end of the mile he has 
become so friendly with his uncongenial companion 
that he offers to go two more (the best reading) with 
him for the pleasure of his company. Such a restora- 
tion of what is, after all, the natural human relation 
when men find themselves walking along a lonely road 
together is the only possible solvent of the distrust 
which tyranny breeds and on which it thrives. It is 
not merely the Christian way; it is the only way out 
of a situation created by an un-Christian order. Jesus 
at once shows His disapproval of political anarchy and 
suggests the best method—if so free and unconsidered 
a demeanour can be called a method—of mitigating the 
power of efficient government to override the freedom 
of the governed; you cannot domineer over such peo- 
ple, for they carry their own large freedom with them. 

Jesus sums up His teaching upon justice in the 
words “Give to every one that asks you.” The fair 


80 The Realism of Jesus 


thing is to treat every one humanly; not always by 
any means to give money, but at least to give every 
one a hearing, to show all comers the consideration 
due to a man. Mercy and justice are not opposites ; 
for men and women like ourselves in a world like this 
mercy is justice. 


XI 
On Patriotism 


THE last of our five examples is that of patriotism, 
in some ways the most difficult of all to place in the 
Christian scheme. Jesus deals with it as He has done 
with the others; He has not come to take it away, but 
to set it in its proper perspective. The word of Scrip- 
ture was “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”; 
that is, on the rabbinic interpretation, “Your country’s 
interests are to be as dear to you as your own.” But 
the scribes went on to say: “If you love your country- 
men more, it follows that you must love the foreigner 
less.” Of course, when once comparisons begin to be 
made, when Jew and Gentile, Britisher and non-Brit- 
isher, are set over against one another, and thought 
of as irreconcilable opposites, the less love soon passes 
into positive hatred. If the preachers to whom Jesus 
had listened so often did not say it in so many words, 
“Thou shalt hate thine enemy’? was the substance of 
their teaching about the foreigner, who was necessarily 
an enemy if all who were not “neighbours” were to be 
regarded as, by comparison, “enemies.” Character- 
istically enough, Jesus answers by appealing not to fine 
theories, but to obvious fact. The final thing, the one 
thing from which there is no getting away, is not that 


we are Jews or Gentiles, British or German, white or 
81 


82 The Realism of Jesus 


coloured people, but that we are men. When for a 
moment we forget the things we have been taught and 
are perfectly natural, as we become in the presence of 
the great realities—birth and death and love—we 
recognise this instinctively, because the bond most 
deeply embedded in our nature holds us tight to the 
essential, the only unalterable fact. All unsophisticated 
people are interested in a baby, be its colour or its par- 
ents what they may; at any rate their first question is 
not “Is it a little Liberal, or else a little Conservative?” 
Racial, national and political differences are compara- 
tively unreal, for we have the blood of all nations 
mingled in our veins and all possible varieties of politi- 
cal opinion huddled up somewhere in our very com- 
plicated minds. The one thing about us concerning 
which there.can be no mistake and no change in this 
world or the other is that we are all men, and that 
rock-bottom truth should be to us, not only once in 
a while when we are surprised into naturalness, but 
always, in the last resort the one thing that really 
counts. 

The great problem meets us, however, when we are 
brought up against situations in which the narrower 
and normally the more intense loyalty, that of country, 
appears to compete with the broader and deeper, that 
of world-brotherhood. Sometimes there is a real and 
very acute conflict of duties, though not nearly as often 
as we think. Here again we may help to clear our 
minds by reference to the actual conditions by which 
our life is controlled. Do we love the old people at 
home less when we make a home of our own, or our 
Church less because we love our country? The objec- 


On Patriotism 83 


tions often raised to “Love your enemies” as a work- 
ing principle of life by those who say that we cannot 
love our enemies as we love our friends, has very little 
substance in it. The answer is, ‘““No one asked you 
to do so.” So long as we persist in thinking, as the 
scribes did, that the whole world is divided up into 
two mutually exclusive groups, “friends” and 
“enemies,” “our people’ and “outsiders,” we shall of 
course take sides with the one party against the other, 
and turn the world, as soon as we conveniently can, 
into a battlefield. Common-sense should tell us that 
only on comparatively rare occasions are we called 
upon to take sides at all. We love our family, our 
school, the members of our political party, our Church, 
our country. None of these loyalties need displace the 
other; each has its claim upon us and asserts itself in 
its turn. But this is the point: none of them plays 
its full part in our lives, is as strong or wise or sure 
as it may be, until all are brought into relation with a 
loyalty deeper and broader than them all, a devotion 
that brings into the scope of leal love names which 
mean more than son or daughter, brother or friend, 
mother or wife, fellow-countryman or fellow-Christian 
—God and man. 

We have ont yet faced up to the fact that there are 
crises in which the more intense and instinctive love 
comes into competition with the wider and less easily 
realised loyalty. When it is a case of love of home 
pitted against love of country, it is generally true, as 
the Great War has proved, that, though love of home 
is not lost or diminished, its claims do give way before 
the call of the country. Is it safe to say, then, that 


84 The Realism of Jesus 


where a choice has to be made the narrower devotion 
must yield to the wider and more exacting demand? 
Evidently in practice it does so very often in the minds 
of quite matter-of-fact people. Should the principle 
hold good all the way? Here we are brought face to 
face with the supremely difficult question of war. If 
we have to make the choice between acting as citizens 
of our country and as citizens of the world, for which 
loyalty shall we stand? Granted that individual in- 
stincts are to give way before those of the home, those 
of father and mother—where collision comes—before 
those of wife and children, those of wife and children 
before those of country, should not the interests of the 
country be subordinate to those of the world? It seems 
to the present writer that for the Christian there can be 
no escape from the position that they should, if there 
is a real collision. There need be none, but in this 
badly-managed society of ours there often is. That, in 
such a case, the interests of the Kingdom must come 
before those of the narrower patriotism does not neces- 
sarily mean that a man should not fight in his country’s 
quarrel; it does mean that the dominating consideration 
in his decision must not be “my country,” but the de- 
fence of civilisation against a danger that can be met 
in no other way, so far as he can see. 

The truth is that all our loyalties only fall into 
their right perspective when God comes into the dis- 
cussion, and Jesus introduces Him at once. Talk about 
world-brotherhood tends rapidly to become unreal, be- 
cause “humanity” is an idea too vast and vague to be 
imaginatively conceived. Jesus begins with the father- 
hood of God, not with the brotherhood of man. God, 


On Patriotism 85 


He says, does not withhold His sunshine and rain from 
men because He does not approve of their behaviour. 
He may be angry with them, but there are certain 
lengths to which He will not go. It seems clear that 
Jesus did not think of God as directly punishing men 
at all—at this point He tacitly corrects the Old Testa- 
ment—trather they punish themselves because they 
think wrongly about God and therefore wrongly about 
themselves and each other. They deliver themselves 
over to Satan, who finds his opportunity in human rash- 
ness, ignorance, and obstinacy. Even “eternal punish- 
ment,” if eternal punishment there is, is self-inflicted, 
for Satan only uses the weapons we put into his hands. 
But whatever we do or suffer, nothing can ever make 
us anything less than children of our Heavenly Father, 
nor can we ever become anything more. We are all 
on the same footing in this life and the next, so far as 
our essential nature is concerned. Recognition of God 
as our common Father, with the loyalty proper to that 
relation, carries with it recognition of all men every- 
where and always as our brothers. As the one comes 
to be instinctive to the man who has learnt his lesson 
in the face of Jesus Christ, so will the other. The 
Christian may disagree acutely with his brother, may 
even have to fight with him; he will never hate him, 
for he will be restrained under all provocation by his 
knowledge, as deep as consciousness itself, that, when 
all is said and done, the other man is his brother. Nor, 
will he ever despair of him, for between brothers the 
time can never come when there cannot be a return and 
a reconciling. May we not venture to say, too, that 
so long as God is his Father, and he is a child, that 


86 The Realism of Jesus 


is, so long as a man is a man, there can be no hopelessly 
lost soul? God is not a man that He should repent, 
or having gone so far with fatherly love, turn round 
and try another way. 

Perhaps something more should be said about na- 
tionality in this connexion, as much of our trouble 
in the present and very much of our hope for the 
future is centred round its renaissance the world over. 
What are we to do with it? If we follow the line of 
thought suggested by the words that introduce this 
section of the Sermon, we see that Jesus definitely in- 
tended to use all that was best in it. That He kept 
the fire of love of country burning in His heart, even 
though He was burdened with the travail of a world’s 
redemption, is clear from the Triumphal Entry, His 
supreme appeal to His own people. That He chose to 
become a Jew shows that there was to Him an eternal 
meaning in national differences. He was proud of 
His country, too; He said “Salvation comes from the 
Jews,” and what greater claim could a patriot make? 
But when he came up against the fact that, according 
to the reasoning of the Rabbis, pro-Jew meant anti- 
Gentile, there is no mistaking the force of His resist- 
ance. It is quite likely that “I was not sent but to the 
lost sheep of the house of Israel” should be read, as 
in the old Syriac version, “I was not sent except after 
these sheep lost from the house of Israel,” and that He 
gave so much time to Galilee precisely because it was 
“Galilee of the Gentiles.” The fraternising of British 
and German soldiers at Christmas-time in the first year 
of the war, the friendly relations set up between the 
men of the army of occupation and the German village- 


On Patriotism 87 


people proves that, in normal men, when they are left 
to themselves, the broader human feeling does run side 
by side with love of country without either interfering 
with the other. The problem of racial difference is 
much more difficult; here there seems to be a natural 
antipathy between white and coloured people, only 
transcended by great souls like Abraham Lincoln. At 
least there is no room in His message for any theory 
that God has set any barriers between race and race 
so high that human fellowship is impossible. If closer 
relations between white and coloured people mean, as 
they tell us, intermarriage, there is at any rate in the 
Sermon on the Mount no suggestion that this possi- 
bility is precluded. 


XII 
The Perfect Law of Liberty 


BEFORE we leave this part of the Sermon something 
more ought to be said as to the only power that can 
make possible the kind of broad, single-minded and 
generous outlook that Jesus has been describing. 
Whenever we get a little below the surface of His 
teaching, we discover that our inability to come any- 
where near carrying out its ideals is due, not so much 
to our lack of sufficient piety or saintliness, as to the 
fact that we are not human enough. Men surround 
themselves with abstractions like “Capital” and 
“Labour,” “Great Britain” and “Germany,” “the yel- 
low peril,” and the “balance of power,” and forget that 
the world is really made up not of powers, interests, or 
parties, but of men, women, and children. Our federa- 
tions, alliances, combines, trade unions, have become 
great and tyrannous machines; if only men and mas- 
ters could meet, not in their official capacity, but on the 
common platform of their manhood, all sorts of diff- 
cult questions might be settled very quickly. The whole 
fabric of civilisation appears to be on the point of 
collapse, because there is not enough common human 
trustfulness and reasonable good nature to carry it 


along. There are the millions of starving people in 
88 


a 


The Perfect Law of Liberty 89 


Russia; the grain to feed them is rotting in America, 
we are told, and the ships to carry the grain are rust- 
ing in our ports. But we cannot trust the Russians, 
and they cannot trust us, so the food that God has 
given to His children cannot be carried to them, be- 
cause we have not got human kindliness enough to let 
pity override suspicion. We are “too unhappy to be 
kind.” 

We are not likely to get much farther on the lines 
of self-development. To take only one example from 
the portrait of the blessed man given by Jesus—that 
of turning the other cheek—surely it is clear that the 
action should be carried through as a matter of duty 
“against the flesh and the blood” is not what is meant. 
We may, if we will, summon up a grotesque picture of 
the would-be Christian openly insulted, remembering 
in the nick of time the verse about non-resistance, and, 
with an expression of saintly resignation, turning the 
other cheek! We know by instinct that this is not 
what Jesus was thinking of. It is the same with the 
friendliness of the disciple. If his only or his chief 
motive is a desire to help, he will only frighten the 
victim of his condescension away; it must be real 
friendliness, a genuine interest in human nature for its 
own sake, not for the sake of the cause so much or 
because he sees a chance of making a convert—he must 
be glad to go the two remaining miles for the pleasure 
of his uncongenial companion’s company. Such tri+ 
umphant friendliness can only come from exuberant 
happiness, and that is what most aspirants for the 
higher life have not got. If we have to make ourselves 
remember that the coloured man is, after all, our 


90 The Realism of Jesus 


brother, we shall patronise him, and he will know and 
resent it. 

The same observation is true in regard to simplicity 
in speech; we use language of forced and unnatural 
violence, because we are trying to persuade ourselves 
as well as other people; we hide our insecurity in a 
cloud of words or in exaggerated emphasis. If we 
were as absolutely certain of our ideal as we should like 
to think we are, we should be content with the twice- 
repeated “yes” or “no.” But our shyness, our pride, 
and our mock-modesty alike arise from an inward 
unrest which we are trying to pretend is not there. 

The only cure for all our ills is to fall in love with 
Jesus, to be set dreaming of and worshipping a Master 
who can never be altogether appropriated or monopo- 
lised, who is just sufficiently outside ourselves to keep 
us from entangling Him with our self-involved 
thoughts. When we are swept away from our moor- 
ings by some great flood of happiness, we do as a 
matter of fact in the first glow of our ecstasy carry 
out some of the commands of Jesus without knowing 
it. Nobody can insult us, however hard they try; we 
want to give something away, we feel friendly with 
all the world. Anyone who saw stolid business men 
offering each other matches in the train on Armistice 
day, men who lived in the same street, but who never 
exchanged more than a curt good morning, chatting 
together like the dearest of old friends, will know that 
a great common joy can break down all barriers. Nor 
is it mere gush; it is the real man breaking through the 
hardness of suburbanism under the pressure of a noble 
emotion. The Sermon on the Mount, however simple 


eae 


The Perfect Law of Liberty 91 


and natural it may be made to look, will always remain 
hopelessly impracticable if we leave out the motive to 
which Jesus always makes His final appeal, that pas- 
sionate absorption in Himself which makes us not so 
much hate ourselves as lose ourselves—to “‘deny him- 
self’ means to act as though self was not there. “He 
that loveth Me keepeth My commandments.” To be- 
gin with self-improvement or even with a longing for 
a fuller life is to begin at the wrong end. It is true 
that He said that people who are discontented with 
themselves and the world about them are likely candi- 
dates for the Kingdom; He had to find some common 
ground with the men and women to whom He made 
His appeal. But the new thing that He came to bring 
was not a new law or way of life primarily; the new 
thing was “for My sake.’ ‘He that finds himself, dis- 
covers the line of thought and life suitable to his own 
particular temperament, shall waste himself; he that 
forgets all about himself in love for Me shall discover 
himself.”’ 

Our love for each other is, of its very nature, exclu- 
sive. It has been called selfishness at the first remove. 
There are no more self-centred people than lovers who 
are absorbed in one another. But the love of Jesus is 
something we can never monopolise, something indeed 
that can only be fully realised in a fellowship. It isa 
fact of experience that our most satisfying revelations 
of the presence of Christ have come to us when a group 
of lovers of their Lord and of each other were seeking 
it together in each other’s company. Those who have 
been through such an experience can never feel about 
each other in the old way again. But it is a revelation 


92 The Realism of Jesus 


of the Risen Lord that we need; as long as Jesus was 
with them as their peculiar possession, the disciples 
were divided. They felt that God was at work in 
Jesus, but He was still altogether outside them—they 
were just spectators, and were for ever quarreling as 
to which of them could get most of Him. Then, be- 
cause they were divided, they failed Him in the hour 
of His need, and their very failure brought them at 
last into a fellowship. When their private hopes and 
prejudices had all been forgotten in their common 
longing for Him, He came back to them, but only to 
tell them that He was theirs for ever on condition that 
they shared Him with all the nations; they were no 
longer to be the disciples of Jesus, for they were to go 
and make disciples of all men. Up till then they had 
watched Him at work and seen God at work in Him; 
now they were to know the fellowship of His Holy 
Spirit ; it was no longer to be “I for you,” but “I with 
you, all of you together, all the days.” 

When Jesus has revealed Himself, not before the 
eyes of any single believer but in the fellowship, when 
we discover that all kinds of people who had seemed 
commonplace before can share with us the same experi- 
ence, human nature becomes radiant with a new glory, 
because He has revealed Himself in it. As the years 
go by, we realise that this is the bond which unites us 
to all men of all nations and classes and temperaments 
—at any moment we may see Christ inthem. Nothing 
is too good to think of our Heavenly Father, for God 
is Jesus everywhere; nothing is too good to hope for 
in each other, because we have seen the Christ come 
to life again in too many of our fellows to imagine 


The Perfect Law of Liberty 93 


that anyone is incapable of revealing something new 
in Him to us. We fall in love with a Jesus, in com- 
pany with whom we do not have to keep the others 
out, if we are to make the most of Him, but with One 
who comes most often and most surely in His little 
brothers, the very people with whom we should have 
nothing in common, if it were not for Him. 


XITl 
On the Practice of Charity 


From consideration of the relation between the old 
and the new religions Jesus now passes to His discus- 
sion of the characteristics of the way of life typical of 
the new age which He has come to bring in. The 
thought uppermost in His mind is not now that of the 
theory of Judaism, but that of the practice of its chief 
exponents, the Pharisaic scribes. The last part of 
Matthew v is an expansion of v. 17-19; Chapter vI 
may be called an exposition of v. 20, which may be 
paraphrased as follows: “All the same, your practice 
of the moral law must go far beyond the code of con- 
duct preached by your professional moralists; only a 
new way of life can qualify you for the new world 
that has come with Me.” At an earlier stage in our 
exposition, we noticed that people who take their re- 
ligious life seriously, as the Pharisees did, are likely 
to be affected harmfully by their separation from the 
life of the world about them in one of two ways— 
either they are tempted to defy public opinion, and so 
to become contemptuous of those whose interests are 
not theirs, or they get into the habit of expecting the 
notice of outsiders; they become professionals in re- 
ligion, and learn half-consciously to pose for effect. 
The less men are like saints and puritans, the more 
94 


On the Practice of Charity 95 


they secretly admire them; it is comparatively easy to 
get a reputation for strictness and devotion in an age 
of loose living. When you become over-conscious of 
the fact that you are different from others, and are 
consequently being watched with curious interest, you 
begin to be a Pharisee. Instead of making a profes- 
sion, you become a professionai—a very different 
thing. 

To this self-conscious hothouse piety carefully culti- 
vated for exhibition purposes Jesus opposes His ideal, 
that of a goodness that never thinks about itself. The 
scribes divided life into three compartments, as far 
as our relation with persons is concerned. Our duty to 
our neighbour they summed up in the word “alms- 
giving,” our duty to God in the word “prayer,” our 
duty to ourselves in the word “fasting”; the three 
taken together constitute “righteousness,” the life of 
perfect obedience. Jesus adopts their classification, 
and has something to say on each of the three topics. 
Then He moves on to discuss our relation to material 
possessions, or things. We ought, however, to bear in 
mind that “duty” is not the most appropriate word, as 
it has but a small place in His vocabulary ; even its idea 
only occurs once in the four gospels. The behaviour 
He describes, as we saw in the last chapter, is not the 
result of prolonged and laborious striving, but is rather 
the spontaneous outflow of a hidden life; not so much 
an attainment as a discovery and a possession. We 
shall use the clue already in our hands and study His 
way of life as a reversion to truth and nature away 
from every kind of affectation and ulterior purpose. 
That is the link that binds the whole Sermon together ; 


96 The Realism of Jesus 


we are to follow it as far as it will take us, and then 
face up to the great difficulty which is waiting for us 
at the end of our quest. 

We start again with a fact of experience; it is natu- 
ral to be kind and to help those who are in distress 
when we can. If we turn away we know that we are 
shutting up our hearts of compassion, forcibly closing 
a door that would otherwise open of its own accord. 
Most people are kinder than they know, for “you may 
expel nature with a pitchfork, it will yet keep for ever 
coming back.’’ Even the jingo journalist, who writes 
about “taking it out of the Huns,” can only do so be- 
cause he has never seen the people he is talking about. 
Jonah professes to be a tremendous fellow in his in- 
dignant hatred of Nineveh, but God has only to leave 
him alone with a plant for twenty-four hours to catch 
him stumbling into love. We cannot keep it up; our 
hatreds have to be nursed to be kept alive at all; we 
talk ourselves and each other into a heat, but love and 
kindness come naturally. If then it is perfectly natural 
to be kind, why expect applause, when for once in a 
while we are true to our own best instincts? Indeed if 
we feel a moral glow when we do a really decent thing, 
we only give ourselves away, for we betray the fact 
that we do not usually do kind things, that what ought 
to be taken for granted does not come quite naturally 
to us. In our early childhood to be kind was perfectly 
natural, but it is so no longer, and that is why we 
plume ourselves on belonging to the select and over- 
burdened few who keep all the charities inside and out- 
side the Churches going. That we say so much about 
what we do or do without, is proof that we are not 


On the Practice of Charity 97 


doing as much as we ought; if we did, our charity 
would have come to be so usual as to pass without 
comment either from ourselves or other people. 

When Jesus says “they have their reward’ He is 
using a metaphor from business-life. When an invoice 
was receipted as “paid with thanks,” they wrote at the 
foot of the bill “I have received’’—the same word. 
The transaction is closed; a reputation for philan- 
thropy has been well and truly earned, and there is an 
end of the matter. It is not so much the desire for a 
reward that is wrong, but the desire for that reward, 
Jesus will have nothing to do with the Stoical idea 
that “virtue is its own reward.” We are nct to wrap 
ourselves up in our own self-complacency, or tell our- 
selves defiantly ‘“They say; do they say? let them say!” 
We ought to care what others think of us; the Chris- 
tian does not scorn popularity, or particularly dislike 
it when it comes; he must be ready to forfeit what he 
feels to be a good thing for the sake of something 

~which he knows to be better. He is concerned with 

the results of his action, for beneficence for its own 
sake has no charms for him. He knows his Father 
will make it up to him in the only way in which he 
looks for an immediate return at all, a growing like- 
ness to Himself, ‘to whom every kindly act of giving 
and every perfect gift” owes its origin, and at last in 
the love of his fellows. 


XIV 
On Prayer 


JUST as it is natural for the child to be kind, so it 
is matter-of-course for him to pray, and prayer is just 
talking to a God who is real and near. All prayer 
engaged in chiefly for the edification of onlookers or 
listeners is nothing more than a transaction between 
the man who prays and the men whom it is supposed to 
benefit; God has nothing to do with it. Public as well 
as private prayer has its place in the life of the be- 
liever, for prayer has a social as it has also a personal 
meaning. Jesus deals first with private prayer. As it 
as the only place at which He gives us specific direc- 
tions for private prayer at all, we shall do well to ex- 
amine His words with special care. There is no need 
to go into any special room or place set apart for the 
purpose, for the Heavenly Father is always on the 
threshold of consciousness; we can always “get 
through.” Sometimes we have gone to a house and 
the bell—if it rings at all—resounds through the hall, 
but no one comes., By and by a head is thrust out of 
an upper window farther along the street, and we are 
told ‘They used to live here, but have left long ago.” 
In prayer we may take it for granted that there is 
always someone at the other end—that is, if we really 
want to talk to our Father. The “secret chamber” of 
98 


ae 


On Prayer 99 


which Jesus speaks does not necessarily mean any pri- 
vate room, but the only inviolable sanctuary in the 
world, the sanctuary of our own soul. In the Old 
Testament (Isa, xxv1, 20) the people are warned to 
take cover to escape the coming wrath, but Jesus says 
our purpose in seeking retirement must not be to avoid 
God, but to find Him; there is a world of difference 
between the ideas of God suggested in the two pas- 
sages. God can be found more readily and surely in 
the “mind of man” than in “the round ocean and the » 
living air.” Just as a child will shut his eyes and pray 
when he is frightened in the street, and so win courage 
to run home, or as the soldier finds God instantly amid 
the roar of guns and the whirl of battle, so anywhere 
and in any conceivable conjunction of circumstances 
the Christian can, if he will, make his way home; the 
“reward” is found often in his own heart, so much 
easier and braver for his prayer, sometimes in imme- 
diate and miraculous deliverance. The faculty which 
the mystics call “recollection” is one we were all born 
with; it is an open secret to the man who has never 
lost, or who has won back again, the childlike spirit. 
Should we then cultivate the habit of prayer at set 
times? There are psychological reasons why we should 
not forget to look in our Father’s direction last. thing 
at night and first thing in the morning, for it is just 
then, we are told, that our subconscious self is most 
active ; the door of the chamber in our soul, closed all 
day except in moments of crisis, opens a little way then, 
and we can give spiritual influence the chance of pene- 
trating our whole being more deeply than when we are 
living a normal life of wide-awake physical activity. 


100 The Realism of Jesus 


When we are too tired or sleepy to make a prayer, a 
look toward God, a thought of Jesus, will do for us 
what hours of laborious devotion could not do at 
another time; our very weariness lays the truth of our 
spirits open to Him, and He will wash our feet. What 
He has done for us we may not know then, but we 
shall know afterwards, next day perhaps, when the 
ordeal we have been long dreading turns out to be less 
severe than we expected, when the word we have been 
trying to find for ourselves is given to us when we most 
desperately want it, when we wake strangely refreshed 
with the Saviour in our heart. A habit of prayer at 
special times is by all means to be encouraged, for if 
we follow the theory that “work is prayer” there is a 
serious danger of our forgetting to pray at all. On 
the other hand, when we pray as a duty, just as when 
we read a “portion” as a duty, not because we find it 
interesting, but because we have set ourselves to get 
through so many verses a day, all value goes out of it. 
We do not think rightly of God if we imagine Him as 
a jealous taskmaster demanding so much attention; 1f 
we feel towards Him as we do towards a father of 
the right kind, we shall want to talk to Him. For 
communion with God solitude is often best; if our 
purpose is to get anything definite done or undone, if 
there is any problem to be solved, it is always better 
to get some real friend to pray along with you (Mat- 
thew xviii. 19). 

The question of public or representative prayer is 
more difficult. Perhaps Jesus said so little about soli- 
tary prayer because He thought that we should not 
need teaching; public prayer will never seem quite sim- 


On Prayer 101 


ple, for there is always a third party present, whose 
need you cannot interpret exactly for him. The first 
thing Jesus tells us on this subject is that we are not 
to talk for the sake of talking, or perhaps (if we admit 
the still more piquant reading of one famous manu- 
script) that we are not to “blether’—the word used 
in the Greek is actually the same, almost letter for 
letter, as the Anglo-American “blether,” ‘blather,’ or 
“‘blither’’—we little knew our rough slang had such 
distinguished authority! The warning is needed, for 
it is the easiest thing in the world for a practised 
speaker to make up sentences, because one has to “lead 
in prayer’; the president of the meeting gives us a 
few minutes’ warning that he is going to call upon us, 
and while the hymn is being sung, we are hurriedly 
putting a few sentences together, so as to be able to get 
going when the time comes! We sometimes try to 
compose a good prayer, making it what is generally 
cailed “comprehensive,’ and forget that prayer is 
simply talking, alone or in company, to our Father. 
Nor are we to adopt a kind of language foreign to our 
usual conversation; for this habit breeds unreality, and 
makes prayer not prayer at all, but a more or less edify- 
ing performance. Queen Victoria disliked Mr. Glad- 
stone because he addressed her as though she were a 
public meeting; is the Father going to like it any bet- 
ter? It is only the heathen, says Jesus, who expect to 
make an impression there by their eloquence. We talk 
to God, not because He likes to be noticed, or needs to 
be informed of our needs, but because the more we 
talk about ourselves, as long as we talk quite frankly, 
the better He is pleased. Some people say, “If the 


102 The Realism of Jesus 


Father knows what we want before we begin to ask, 
why pray at all?’ Again common-sense comes to our 
help; any father likes his boy to come and ask him 
frankly, even though he knows by the way he comes 
into the room that he is going to ask for something, 
and he may not intend to give it him; the more ready 
he is to come, the more straightforwardly he asks, the 
stronger and the safer are the ties that bind father and 
son together. Private prayer is only laborious and 
unreal because so many of us have lost the power to 
think of God as the little child does, public prayer 
partly for that reason, and partly because of our lack 
of sympathetic understanding of the real human needs 


of the people on whose behalf we are trying to pray. It 


is all amazingly clear and simple, as Jesus puts it, but 
it goes down to the roots of that endJessly recurring 
problem, “the seeming unreality of the spiritual life.” 
We must leave further discussion of this difficulty to 
a later chapter, when other aspects of the problem will 
be in view. Meanwhile we who know what it is to 
give a subscription because we shall be thought mean 
if we do not or to encourage the others, who know 
what it means to engage in prayer at a public meeting 
merely because we are asked, and to fumble our way 
through a few perfunctory sentences, stand condemned 
not only by the teaching of Jesus, but by our own lost 
simplicity of heart, the unquestioning acceptance of the 
Kingdom of God of which we were capable in our 
comparatively unspoilt days. 


ee ee ee ee eee 


XV 
The Lord’s Prayer 


JEsuS goes on to give us a pattern for our public 
prayer. Every petition finds a parallel somewhere in 
rabbinic writings, but never before had these great 
sentences been gathered together into one short liturgy. 
Differences in the Revised Version of Luke’s Gospel 
are accounted for by the fact that Luke’s rendering 
(“Father, hallowed be Thy name; Thy Kingdom come; 
give us day by day our bread for the coming day; and 
forgive us our sins, as we forgive everyone who is 
in debt to us; and lead us not into trial’) is in prose, 
whereas Matthew’s is in liturgical and rhythmical form. 
“Father” and “Our Father” would both be “Abba” in 
the Aramaic original; “which art in Hevean’” is a Jew- 
ish evasion, for reasons of reverence, of the name of 
Jehovah. 

The first necessity, if the Christian life is to become 
the way of all God’s children, is that men should come 
to think of God as their Father in the sense in which 
Jesus used the word. The unhappy fact is that to 
many of them, now as then, “Father” cannot mean 
what it meant to Jesus; they never “knew a father’s 
pity.’ The keynote of the prayer is to be found in the 
words “Our Father,” and we are bidden to pray that 


the name “Our Father’ may come to stand to all the 
103 


104 The Realism of Jesus 


children for all that is most sacred, for all that they 
had ever associated with the idea of God; that His 
power, His holiness, the attributes which they have 
learnt to think of as peculiarly His, should be taken 
up into the idea of His perfect fatherhood. We are 
not to say, at least when we pray together, “My 
Father,’ for the Christian does not desire, like the mys- 
tic, any privileged or merely individual communion 
with God. 

Each petition is contained in the one before it; the 
new world in which God is King will come when all 
men think of God as “Father’’ in the sense in which 
Jesus used the word. “Thy will be done, on earth 
as in Heaven” is not in Luke, and is probably an ex- 
planation supplied by the author of our Gospel him- 
self, but taken from that other ‘‘Lord’s prayer” in 
Gethsemane, of the meaning of “Thy Kingdom come.” 
The Kingship and the Fatherhood of God are not two 
different conceptions, for God can never rule except 
by consent of His subjects; the only distinction is one 
of approach. We think of God as “Father” in view 
of what we receive from Him, as “King” in view of 
the service we can render to Him. The “Kingdom”’ is 
the “Fatherhood” organised; a strain of thought now 
comes into the prayer which must be steadily kept in 
mind all the way through. Each of the prayers which 
follow suggest lines of social service, as well as of 
aspiration and intercession. The word translated 
“daily”? has been the subject of almost endless discus- 
sion, and I am not able to choose confidently between 
the renderings “for the coming day’ and “needful.” 
In favour of the first translation are most philological 


The Lord’s Prayer 105 


considerations ; on behalf of the second many rabbinic 
parallels can be urged. There can be little doubt that 
there is a reference implied here to the daily provision 
of “manna.” The idea of living one day at a time 
played a great part in the thought of Jesus about trust 
in the Heavenly Father, and is brought out again and 
again in the First Gospel. At the end of this chapter 
He bids us take our troubles by daily instalments: here 
He bids us pray that our strength to bear them may 
be ministered to us in daily portions; “as thy days, so 
shall thy strength be.”” There is no need, with Origen 
and other Fathers of the Church, to spiritualise “daily” 
bread into “heavenly” bread, for all kinds of necessary 
supports are included in this great phrase; friendship, 
replenishment of our stock of ideas, the renewal of the 
freshness of our imagination, art, poetry, and music 
as well as provision for the preaching of the gospel and 
the ministration of the means of grace, are all part of: 
our needful daily bread. It would be easy to show that 
such ideas as the “right to work” and to be paid a 
living wage, free education, a reasonable observance of 
Sunday, and world-evangelisation, are all contained in 
this one petition. Nor have we any right whatever te 
pray for the daily bread ourselves, while we do not 
co-operate with God in the feeding of His other chil 
dren. God feeds His children, not by ravens, but by 
the help of the others; there is food enough in the 
world for all, but Russians are starving in millions, 
because their brothers will not help the Father to carry 
the food He has given to them. It is not enough to 
pray for the hungry, to say “God bless you; be ye 
warmed and fed’’; we must lend a hand in the answer- 


106 The Realism of Jesus 


ing of our own prayers. The Father works through 
the family, and every human family is based on a sac- 
ramental fellowship of giving and taking. Lest we 
should think that to give is a favour and to receive a 
humiliation, He has identified Himself not only with 
him who gives, but also with those who can only re- 
ceive: “Inasmuch as you have done it to one of these 
very little brothers of Mine, you have done it unto 
Me’—“‘Give Me a drink” He said to a despised woman, 
to whom no one cared to be obliged, then “You should 
have asked of Me,” as I was not too proud to ask 
from you, “and I would have given you living water.” 
“Tf IT was hungry, would I tell you?” the self-sufficient 
God of the Old Testament declares. “I was hungry, 
and you fed Me,” says the God of the New, who, 
though He was rich, the giver of all, yet for our sakes 
became poor, not too proud to take from anyone who 
would give Him a meal, eating the food of the Phari- 
sees who patronised Him, a very Lazarus glad of the 
scraps from the rich man’s table! What a scourge for 
the pride of those of us who do not care to be obliged 
to anybody! 

In the next clause Jesus is again echoing sayings of 
the Jewish fathers, but He makes the forgiveness of 
sins directly dependent upon our forgiveness of each 
other. “Forgive thy neighbour his offences against 
thee,” says Jesus the son of Sirach, ‘‘so shall thy sins 
be forgiven when thou prayest.” The greater Jesus 
says outright that our sins will not be forgiven unless 
we forgive. Perhaps we ought to say to men first, not 
“set right with God,” but “get right with men.” Here 
is the reason for the vagueness and uncertainty of our 


Sa Se: Se ae 


The Lord’s Prayer 107 


spiritual experience; we cannot find God, we cannot 
worship or pray to Him until we have made an hon- 
est attempt to get right with our brother. There is a 
great difficulty peeping out at us again here, but we 
must leave it till we have covered all the ground. 
Meanwhile, we cannot fail to see that Jesus leaves us 
no escape; it is simply not true to say that we cannot 
forgive. If we say that we can forgive, but cannot 
forget, the truth is that we have not forgiven. We 
can forget by habitually turning our mind to other 
things, by making ourselves remember that we are 
hopelessly in debt to Him, and that our little debts to 
one another are as nothing in face of our overwhelm- 
ing obligation to Him. 

“Deliver us from the evil one,” like “Thy will be 
done,” is not in Luke; it is again a quotation from a 
prayer of Jesus, this time in the Fourth Gospel: “I 
pray not that Thou shouldest take them out of the 
world, but that Thou shouldest deliver them from the 
evil one in the world.” The Rabbis help us here very 
greatly: one of them said that David fell into sin with 
Bathsheba because he said presumptuously “Search me 
and prove me’; he had no business to declare himself 
ready to pass any test. The word of Jesus in Geth- 
semane helps us still more: “Pray,” He said to His 
disciples, ‘‘that you enter not into trial.’ They are 
to pray that they may not be caught in the backwash 
of the crisis which the Lord Himself was facing then; 
He was anxious that they should not be tested too 
severely, for He knew better than they how unfit they 
were. As the Christian begins every day, he is not to 
feel himself ready for anything that may come along, 


108 The Realism of Jesus 


but weak and unsure of himself; he is to pray that he 
may not be subject to too much pressure to-day. 
Obviously Temperance Reform and our campaigns for 
social purity find their truest vindication here; we must 
help to guard the little ones from temptation, for the 
fellow-feeling of our own weakness should make us 
pitiful—‘‘watching yourself anxiously, lest you also be 
tempted.” To say that temptation is a good thing is 
to make a suggestion utterly alien from the thought of 
Jesus. 


XVI 
On Self-discipline 


JEsus does not dwell upon the subject of “fasting” 
at great length, perhaps because He did not attach so 
much importance to abstinence as to active benevolence 
and prayer. The practice of self-discipline is never 
inculcated as a duty, but regarded, like prayer and 
almsgiving, as a spontaneous expression of the hidden 
life of the heart. Indeed, the desire to be fit and 
healthy is as perfectly natural to the schoolboy as 
prayer is to the little child; he thinks it no hardship 
to train in order to qualify for the school football team, 
and training always means doing without. Jesus says 
“when you fast,” taking it for granted that we shall 
see the need of exercising ourselves in self-control. 

But Christian fasting will never be primarily ascetic, 
never fasting for the sake of fasting. When Jesus 
fasted during His temptation in the wilderness, it was 
probably only because none of His accustomed food 
was ready to hand; the meaning of Matthew’s “when 
He had fasted” would be covered, if we think of a 
meagre and casual diet, like John the Baptist’s. He 
did not, it appears, fast deliberately, but went away 
for quiet thought into a region where going short of 
food was inevitable unless special provision was made. 


The Spirit urged Him to go there, and He knew that 
109 


110 The Realism of Jesus 


the Father could keep Him alive without food if He 
chose. 

That there is a kind of competition between bodily 
and spiritual fitness is clear from the fact that the con- 
structive energies of the spirit are often most active 
when the body is weary and restless; a sleepless, uneasy 
night has, in the experience of some of us, more than 
once been the occasion of real and lasting illumination. 
This is probably the secret of the asceticism of the 
saints, but perhaps the truth is that there is something 
morbid about a self-conscious development either of 
body or soul. From such excess the teaching and prac- 
tice of Jesus is entirely free. Our Lord does say, it is 
true, that where there is serious danger of competition, 
the soul must be the first consideration. The words 
which convey this warning, in their fullest form (Mk. 
ix. 43 ff.) may be paraphrased: “If your daily busi- 
ness is your hindrance (‘your hand’ stands for the 
work you are doing every day, the activity which has 
become second nature) cut yourself away from it, no 
matter what it costs; better be a broken bankrupt man 
and keep your soul alive, than in the full tide of your 
well-being be flung on the rubbish-heap where the 
fire never dies down. And if your habits (‘your foot’ 
stands for the tricks and mannerisms which have be- 


come second nature) are your hindrance, break away 


from them at all costs; better limp the rest of your 
days away, better live a maimed and thwarted life, than 
drift along with smoothness and ease the primrose path 
to the everlasting fire. And if worldly ambitions or be- 
setting passions are your hindrance, tear them out of 
your heart; better live what the world calls a narrow 


On Self-discipline 111 


one-eyed life than, knowing good and evil, the widest- 
awake of all shrewd fellows, to find yourself flung out 
on God’s rubbish-heap, where the worm of remorse is 
always gnawing, and the fire never dies down.” Read 
from this point of view, the passage means: “If it is a 
question of manhood versus ease, success, or mechani- 
cal efficiency, choose manhood, no matter what pain 
or loss the choice may entail.” It has no direct refer- 
ence to self-mutilation; it is not self-denial that is 
recommended for the sake of self-denial, but self- 
denial for the sake of the better kind of fitness. 

As for the practice of Jesus, there is no evidence 
that He needed to “beat His body black and blue, to 
keep it in harness,’ as Paul and so many of His fol- 
lowers have found occasion to do. His disciples, He 
said, would feast when He was with them, and “fast’” 
only when He was taken away; neither convivial merri- 
ment nor abstinence are ends in themselves, for both 
are sacramental, that is, they are symbolic of spiritual 
realities. The Gospels know nothing either of feasting 
for the satisfaction of appetite or fasting for the morti- 
fication of the flesh. To the Oriental to “eat one’s mor- 
sel alone’ was a grave misdemeanour; in the parable 
the rich fool was a fool because he planned to eat, 
drink, and be merry by himself. It was when Judas 
had shared the bread with Jesus that ‘Satan entered’’ 
into him, for that he was indifferent to such an appeal, 
to an Eastern the token of complete trust and friend- 
ship that knows no reservations and demands un- 
swerving loyalty, was his condemnation. As feasting 
together is the symbol of joy in fellowship, so fasting 
is the natural expression of separation and regret. The 


112 The Realism of Jesus 


disciple will not fast because he feels he must as be- 
cause in certain moods of homesickness, inevitable to 
a lover of His Lord, it is the only thing suitable to 
his condition. 

But the chief concern of Jesus is not that we should 
keep Lent or refrain from doing so, as that in any case 
we should consume our own smoke, we should not 
make others suffer because of our self-denial. Those 
who fast for appearance sake, because they have a 
reputation for strictness to keep up, He says, affect a 
sour expression and destroy their natural good looks; 
they resent the ill-timed hilarity of other people, and 
are specially anxious that everybody should be aware 
that they are not going out to parties or playing cards 
this year. The disciple, on the other hand, is at such 
times to be better groomed and, if anything, more 
sociable than usual; the attention of his friends is not 
to be drawn to the fact that he is denying himself. He 
will not shadow their joy or rebuke their indulgence by 
bringing into prominence the hard tasks at which he 
labours or the good things he does without. His dark 
hours he will keep to himself, and will take pains not 
to let his devotion make him disagreeable or allow the 
hardship he endures to sour him. In days when good 
works are left more and more to the faithful few it is 
specially difficult to avoid parading the fact that we 
are doing work that others should be sharing with us. 
When Jesus was happy, He could not have His friends 
too near; He drew near to His disciples on the moun- 
tain of Transfiguration “and touched them”; in 
Gethsemane, on the other hand, He would not let them 
come too close or see too much, and bade them pray 


On Self-discipline 113 


that they should not enter into association with His 
grief or become involved in His trial. He shared His 
joys, and kept His darkest sorrows to Himself. 

We find in this passage a new ideal of sociability. 
The disciple will have no need of a well-spread table 
or convivial company to make him unnaturally cheer- 
ful. Lightness of heart is native to him; the grief 
about him is for ever breaking in upon his peace, and 
for a while his mind is clouded, but the sun shines out 
again. On the last night, though the passion was so 
close upon Him and the traitor so near that He could 
not share the cup of good-fellowship with His friends, 
Jesus was still the soul of the company, He could still 
shut the door upon whatever the next hour might 
bring. Nor was it a forced cheerfulness; never was 
His peace more obviously His own than on the eve of 
His parting from it. The pagan mind forgets its 
native heaviness and gloom by the help of wine and 
good company, for a little while forgetting to be un- 
happy, but the foundation of the Christian’s life lies 
secure in the centre of peace; sometimes the sorrows 
of the world about him or his own sense of unworthi- 
ness may darken the natural brightness of his spirit, 
and he forgets to be happy for a while, but the hidden 
life of the heart will reassert itself before long; his re- 
actions are ever from depression to happiness, because 
his mind swings back easily from an uncongenial world 
and a disappointing self to rest upon his adorable Lord. 
“He has often tried to be a philosopher, but cheerful- 
ness will keep breaking in.” 


XVII 
On the Saving of Money 


So far the Master’s description of the new way of 
life He came to establish has dealt with the disciple’s 
relation to persons—his brother, his Father, himself. 
The rest of chapter vi is concerned with his hold upon 
things, and one of the most important things as well 
as one of the most difficult to handle, is money. Jesus 
regards money as serving in the thoughts and plans of 
its would-be possessors three main purposes ; it pro- 
fesses to provide the promise of security in the future, 
maintenance in the present, and the means of a beauti- 
ful life—in-other words, as guaranteeing continued 
existence, insurance, and adornment. Things—that is, 
property generally—obviously take second place in the 
scheme of Jesus, though He is aware that they tend to 
take first place with some of us; perhaps it is true that 
there is a never-ending competition between the claims 
of persons and those of things upon our time and 
energy. Jesus is clearly very decidedly on the side of 
personal relations; “you cannot be in bondage to God 
(the Person) and Mammon (the thing) at the same 
time!’ At home you can either have happy children 
or undisturbed tidiness; it is difficult to do justice to 
both together. You can either give yourself up to your 
114 


On the Saving of Money 115 


family or your books, for in all departments of life no 
man can be entirely at the disposal of two masters. 
The perennial problem is that of striking a just bal- 
ance. Again,.as in the case of home and country, 
country and world, there need be no mutual exclusion, 
if we can keep clear of fanaticism and excessive spe- 
cialisation. But that a real competition exists there can 
be no question, ror indeed that we have often to curb 
our natural bent towards our favourite pursuits if we 
are to keep our souls and remain human. WIDELEEE LA 
says Jesus, “cut off hand or foot,” better feel ourselves 
futile and inefficient to the end of our days than become 
ever so perfect in one department, but only perfect 
machines. The case of the Gerasene swine is enough 
to show that Jesus cared little or nothing about prop- 
erty, even when it was other people’s property, if it 
came into conflict with the interests of a man, there is 
no suggestion of compensation for the loss of the pigs. 
Jesus deals first of all with the case of those who 
have more money than they need for present necessi- 
ties, then with those who cannot meet day-by-day ex- 
penses for maintenance without a good deal of schem- 
ing. Does “lay not up your treasure upon earth” mean 
that we are not to save or invest money or think about 
the future at all? We have no definite word of His 
to settle the point, for the parable of the talents does 
not involve approval of a system of “interest” any 
more than that of the unjust steward implies a favour- 
able verdict upon the social and industrial order which 
the steward used in so business-like a fashion. The 
commercial system characteristic of the age is cited in 
both cases as aw illustration, its essential rightness or 


116 The Realism of Jesus 


otherwise not being under discussion. Our Lord’s 
main emphasis seems to be upon the word “treasure.” 
A moderate insurance may indeed be plausibly de- 
fended as an aid to the living of an undistracted life. 
It is clear, too, from Mark vii. 9 ff. that Jesus took 
family responsibilities very seriously, so that we cannot 
be far wrong when we say that the duty of proper 
provision for those whom we have made our own or 
who have made themselves our own by their devotion 
is part of His plan of life for men who, unlike Himself, 
are not free to ignore these questions altogether. His 
mother was provided for by His brothers, and when 
they, or some of them, proved themselves unsympa- 
thetic at the crisis of her life, He saw to it that she 
was taken care of by the beloved disciple. Perhaps 
our inference should be that we are to do what we can, 
but that our chief reliance for ourselves and for those 
who depend upon us should not be placed in the money 
we can set apart for them. 

If we over-insure, or are uneasy because we cannot 
insure adequately against personal and domestic risks, 
or if we are altogether carried away in the event of our 
investments being lost, or the bank in which we have 
laid up our savings breaking, we betray the fact that 
our trust rests upon a false basis, that the house of our 
life has been built upon sand. No one in these days of 
swaying exchanges and the general depreciation of se- 
curities, needs to have it explained to him what “moth 
and rust doth corrupt” means, or requires persuasion 
that money investments are precarious at best. As 
always, Jesus builds His doctrine upon rock-bottom 
fact, for the truth is that all our insurances can never 


On the Saving of Money 117, 


really insure us; when all is said and done, we have 
to trust in the Heavenly Father ; no other final security 
is open to us. This does not absolve us from doing 
what we can for ourselves, for there is a world of 
difference between living im and living on trust. If our 
easy living ends in making us a burden upon others, 
the fact that we have not worried about the future does 
not make our carelessness Christian. Nevertheless, it 
remains true that all the trouble and forethought in 
the world cannot achieve a certain provision even of 
the bare necessities of life. We have a precarious 
tenure anyhow, and it is not getting any less precarious 
as the years go by and insurance premiums rise. 

But Jesus is never content merely with a piece of | 
excellent advice. The time came when He felt Himself 
responsible for a large and very exacting family, con- 
sisting as it did of “five thousand men, not counting 
women and children.” Nothing could be done to cater 
for their wants by any organization of relief, and they 
were in that desolate place after closing time, simply 
because they had followed Him. At last they were 
ready to share round—this is very important—what- 
ever was forthcoming, and as Head of the family He 
taught them what the trustful spirit which He had 
recommended could do. The loaves were multiplied, 
as they always are when men are reduced to a brother- 
hood of common destitution, and all alike have learned 
from their necessity the lesson of trust. There would 
be no special meaning for us in the story, if the miracle 
had never been repeated; loaves have been multiplied 
times without number in the adventurous history of 
the poor. It may well be, so one leading economist tells 


118 The Realism of Jesus 


us, that before the present world-crisis has passed, 
many of us who little dream that real want can ever 
come our way will be tested to the uttermost. Then 
we shall discover where our “treasure” really is— 
perhaps also what Christian brotherhood can mean. 
We remind ourselves that it was when men were will- 
ing to share round that the loaves were multiplied, but 
must leave the human factor in the problem of provi- 
sion for all to another chapter, 


XVIII 
Then Why Does Provision Fail? 


A HINT was given at the end of last chapter that it 
was only when men were willing to share round what- 
ever food was to be found in the company that the 
loaves were multiplied. When we consider this, which 
is after all the ultimate problem for society in this life 
—how to keep men and women alive—we come to see 
how extraordinarily strong the temptation must have 
been to Jesus to turn stones into bread. ‘The exercise 
of such a power would have solved at a blow the most 
urgent and harassing difficulty of all—how to insure 
that men and women shall be kept in being at all for 
better things than loaves and fishes. How much 
trouble it would have saved the starving millions of 
Russia and the world if we could simply have met their 
need by praying that the stones of the steppes might be 
turned into bread! Jesus did it, or something like it, 
once; why did He not do it once and for all? Of 
course, it is true that if men did not have to work, 
they would cease to be men at all, but become molluscs 
of some kind. But the principle “if any man will not 
work, neither let him eat” does not cover the ground of 
such a catastrophe as this, a catastrophe perpetually 
recurring in history. The difference between the 
miracle of turning stones into bread in the desert and 
119 


120 The Realism of Jesus 


multiplying loaves and fishes by the lake of Galilee 
is surely this—that in the first case God in Jesus would 
have been doing something for us, in the second He 
did something along with us—the loaves and fishes 
were contributed by people who might have had enough 
for themselves if they had held on to what they had, 
but who could not see how what they gave up could be 
made to go round if it went into the common stock. 
There was no harvest in Russia because of the long- 
continued drought in the spring, and we may call that 
a failure on the part of Providence if we will, but in 
Canada and America there was a surplus the same 
year ; probably it is true that whenever there has been 
a shortage in one country, there has been a better crop 
than usual in another. As a matter of fact there is 
enough food in the world to feed every man, woman 
and child in Russia and everywhere else—it is man who 
has failed his brother. 

We must remind ourselves again at this point of a 
truth which has come out clearly enough in our expo- 
sition of the earlier part of the Sermon, that the rela- 
tions of the Father with His children and of the chil- 
dren with one another are interlocked. Help has come 
a thousand times to those in desperate need in what 
seemed to be miraculous ways, but it has come by 
human agency; we always have a share in answering 
our own prayers for God’s other children. In these 
days we are not allowed to be ignorant any longer of 
any calamity that has fallen upon or threatens any of 
our brothers from one end of the world to the other; 
isolation was never splendid; it is now seen to be im- 
possible. Unless we feed the Russians, we are told on 


Then Why Does Provision Fail? 121 


the best authority we shall be visited before long with 
pestilence, if not with famine, and this is not because 
God takes vengeance upon our hardness of heart, but 
just because we are all bound up in the bundle of life 
together, and there is no escape. Perhaps this point 
does not need labouring, but there are two questions 
which cry out for some kind of treatment. First, does 
the philosophy of life and social relations which under- 
lies the teaching of Jesus involve economic commun- 
ism? and, second, what part has the Church, the fellow- 
ship of believers, to play in the manifest unrest and 
insecurity of our times? As to the first question, it 
may be true that we can never make men equal, or, if 
we could, would they remain equal for long? The 
economic possibility of absolute communism is a matter 
on which the experts must be heard; on the whole, they. 
may perhaps be said to be against it. The fact remains 
that the first disciples of Jesus were in practice com- 
munists, and that one of the results of the coming of 
the Spirit of Jesus upon the fellowship was that an ex- 
periment was made in that direction. Whether that 
attempt was a success or not is not relevant, for its 
failure was due to a breakdown in human nature, to 
the coming into the fellowship of people who had never 
been imbued with its spirit, not to any defect in the 
idea. These facts—I believe they are indisputable— 
show us very clearly in which direction the truest 
Christian instinct will manifest itself. The bias of 
the disciple who has the mind of Christ will always be 
towards communism. But what was said about divorce 
in a previous chapter is true also in this matter. It is 
one thing to say that the disciple will live a communistic 


122 The Realism of Jesus 


life in practice so far as he can, it is quite another to 
suggest that communism should be made compulsory, 
or that the Church should seek to impose its own stand- 
ard on the state by pressure from outside. To say 
that for Christians marriage is indissoluble is not to 
say that we should seek to secure legislation making 
divorce impossible for all: such a theory—the theory 
I mean of the eternal validity of the marriage-bond— 
does impose too great a strain upon un-Christianised 
human nature. We should leave it open to men and 
women to take some less binding vow, if they cannot 
make a profession of absolute loyalty to the command 
of Christ about marriage, but we should not sanction 
such marriage by use of Church premises and the 
Christian rite. In much the same way, we are riding 
for a very bad fall if we try to make communism com- 
pulsory either inside or outside the Church. For the 
Church was never intended to be the home merely of 
mature Christians; it is to be a hospital rather than a 
fraternity of people who agree on all matters that con- 
cern the interpretation of the law of Christ. The bias 
of the fully-developed and instructed believer will 
always be towards communism in his own practice, and 
if as the years go by we and other Christians do not 
find ourselves making experiments in that direction in 
regard to our own practice, we should gravely question 
whether after all we have the Master’s spirit ;* we have 
no right to insist upon all would-be members of the 
Church taking a vow of communism; even the early 


2John Wesley, it now appears from the diary of one of his 
preachers, formulated a scheme for a voluntary communism in 
his “societies,” but it was discouraged by his more cautious 
helpers. 


Then Why Does Provision Fail? 123 


Christians, as is clear from the Acts of the Apostles, 
never dreamt of this. 

We have no right to demand from those who wish 
to enter our fellowship anything more, it seems to me, 
than a general profession of a desire to follow Christ; 
but ought we to be in a position to offer them some 
kind of organisation which may be to them a visible 
realisation of the fact of Christian brotherhood, which 
may give them the chance of learning what trust in the 
Heavenly Father means? There is very little substance 
in the observation, so often made, that we ought not 
to make the entrance into the Church too easy; nothing 
could be more indulgent than the reception given to 
the prodigal son by the father, the only requirement 
suggested by the story being that he wanted to come; 
even his beginnings of penitence were smothered in 
a kiss. We ought to take in everybody who professes 
a real desire to join us, and “easy come” is the only 
way recognised by Jesus. In these days at least men 
do not join the Church, except for the reason that they 
feel the need to do so. Demands will be made presently 
and the road will become rough and troublesome; the 
gate may be narrow, but it should at least be wide open. 
We are not likely to fall into the mistake of encourag- 
ing people to come in for what they can get; the truth 
is that we ought to be able to offer them very much 
more than we do. 

Is it reasonable, for instance, to exhort men not to 
worry about the future, if we make no attempt to help 
them carry our advice into practice, to provide the pos- 
sibility of the undistracted life for them? Too often 
our preaching of the Sermon on the Mount is in the 


124 The Realism of Jesus 


air, because we have not done our part to help the 
people whom we exhort to live the life we preach. In 
the matter of providing security for His children, God 
works through the other members of the family. 
When Jesus bade men leave all to follow Him, He built 
up at the same time a fellowship in which those who 
joined would not be allowed to worry, because there 
was no need for it; the rest of the brothers saw to 
that. Is not the time coming when we shall have to 
make it possible to say to those who seek to join us, 
“Tf you come in and try to follow the law of Christ 
with us, we will see that neither you nor your wife 
and children are allowed to go under.” It can surely 
never be argued by anyone who has read the Gospels 
with any kind of attention that the Church’s business 
is with spiritual, and not with material matters; that 
is a distinction for which there is no warrant anywhere 
either in the teaching or the practice of Jesus. The 
time is coming when, so far from discouraging insur- 
ance, the Church will have to offer the security of her 
resources to her poorer members; when adventurous 
experiments will have to be made in a new kind of 
friendly society, in which the first consideration shall 
not be ability to contribute, but need. Nor is it right 
that we should expect the poor man to expose his in- 
come and expenditure to us, or prove that he is a de- 
serving case, unless the rich man is required also, if 
necessary, to put his private accounts on the table. It 
is an interesting and suggestive fact that the two Chris- 
tian Churches which have increased most rapidly dur- 
ing the last few years are precisely the two societies 
which demand the least profession of faith on entrance 


Then Why Does Provision Fail? 125 


and the utmost openness and unreserve afterwards—I 
mean the Roman Catholic Church and the Society of 
Friends. In this direction at least I believe they are 
substantially right. We must either give up preaching 
the life of trustfulness in God and our brother at all, 
or we must experiment until we have found out a way 
of providing some kind of visible embodiment of the 
law of life we proclaim in practice. We have no busi- 
ness to make any such organisation of Christian ideals 
compulsory upon all Church-members; it is our busi- 
ness to see that such adventures in fellowship are un- 
dertaken and that everyone has the option of entering 
a really communistic brotherhood. It is also incumbent 
upon us never to require a confidence from anyone else, 
which we are not prepared to give him in return, with 
precisely the same sacrifice in privacy. 


XIX 
Necessities and Luxuries 


Jesus deals at greater length with the problem of those 
to whom the provision of the bare necessities of life 
must always occupy most of their waking thought. 
They, He says, have the same resource as rich people 
who can save money have, the only safeguard open to 
any man—the love of the Heavenly Father. We have 
tried, in the last chapter, to face the greatest difficulty 
here—the fact that the loving provision of the Father 
may not reach His neediest children, because the other 
members of the family keep too much to themselves. 
We must not forget that Jesus Himself knew what the 
extreme of pdverty meant, that He had lived amongst 
people who must often have wondered, when the har- 
vest failed, or under pressure of debt they were forced 
to sell their little scrap of land to some wealthy Greek 
landowner, where their next meal was to come from. 
When the crop was a failure, the whole village would 
suffer, and the village tradesman would be hard hit like 
the rest. Many of these Galileans had become little 
better than serfs on the estates of Gentiles, and those 
who had managed to keep their small holdings, were 
hopelessly in debt to members of the publican class, 
many of whom were private and very oppressive 


money-lenders, as well as collectors of customs and 
126 


Necessities and Luxuries 127 


excise. The amazing thing is that Jesus never shows 
a trace of class-bitterness ; if we want a side-light upon 
conditions among the peasant-class of Palestine we 
must go to the “Egyptian rubbish-heaps” from which 
the most pitiful appeals against the profiteers of that 
age have come down to us in extraordinary numbers, 
or in the New Testament to the Epistle of James: “Do 
not the rich drag you to the courts of justice?’ “Be- 
hold, the pay of the men who reaped your lands, so 
long withheld by you, cries out against you and the 
cry of your harvesters has come to the ears of the Lord 
of Hosts!” In the Sermon on the Mount, on the other 
hand, the “adversary” is only mentioned casually, but 
a little imagination will help us to see the tragedies that 
lie behind the references to the law-courts and forced 
labour, to the “heavy-laden working people.” 

At first sight it seems cold comfort to tell people 
harassed as so many of the peasants of Galilee were, 
so go and study the wild birds, who are fed by the 
Heavenly Father, though they do not sow or reap or 
lay up a store for the winter. Certainly our needs are 
immeasurably greater, and less easily met; we cannot 
_ be satisfied with “an ounce of hempseed.” There is a 
saying of Jesus found in a Mohammedan book, which 
deals with this very point, and it is so delightfully hu- 
morous that we should like to believe it genuine. “But 
if you say, Our stomachs are greater than theirs (the 
birds), consider the camels.” The camel seems to have 
attracted Jesus by its grotesque outline, and in another 
place He pictures a man trying to gulp down a camel— 
a delightful subject for an artist skilled in the gro- 
tesque—and a camel trying to drag its hump through 


128 The Realism of Jesus 


a needle’s eye; I have been assured by those who have 
watched the antics of this clumsy but very useful quad- 
ruped that its manceuvres are a perpetual feast for the 
contemplative eye. Queer and awkward as the camel 
is, he is an excellent example of the adaptation of 
means to ends by a tirelessly ingenious providence, and 
his digestive apparatus is the most wonderful part of 
him. He is specially made for the thirsty barren 
desert, and can go short of food and water for days 
together without inconvenience. Jesus knew by His 
own experience in the wilderness of Judza that the 
Father can keep His children alive under the most diffi- 
cult circumstances, if they are trustful and obedient. 
Though we are such complicated creatures, we are not 
to think that we are so perplexing a problem to Him 
as we are to ourselves. We sometimes talk as if there 
never had been anybody quite like us before, as if our 
temperaments were as baffling to our Father as they 
are to us. Jesus answers us playfully; do you think 
that a God who has a place in His world for things so 
different as birds and camels, is going to be beaten by 
your The resources of providence are not exhausted 
when we can see no way out; our Father may be a 
little cleverer than we give Him credit for being 
sometimes. 

But apart from what are called the bare necessities, 
Jesus knows that we need more than just to be kept 
alive. He never sought to force a pinched and unnat- 
urally meagre way of life upon His disciples. He said 
once, according to Mark’s Gospel, that no one had 
parted with anything good for His Gospel’s sake which 
he would not get back many times over in this life: 


Necessities and Luxuries 129 


“fathers and mothers” (the best reading here is that 
of the Western text—‘‘mother”—we can do with any 
number of fathers, but one mother is enough for any 
man), “brothers and sisters,’ and so on. Nor does 
He leave the amenities of life to the other world. 
Whether we know it or not, an element of beauty, a 
“srain of glory” in our life here is a necessity, not a 
mere luxury. But men’s longing for beauty is often 
like their need for God; it is not by any means always 
a felt want; the effect of its absence can only be traced 
in a misdirected restlessness. Those of us who have 
lived much in colliery districts know very well why the 
miner seems never to be contented, though he squats 
with apparent complacency among the cinders at the 
public-house corner. How can he be anything but 
blindly rebellious, when God made him one thing and 
we have made him another? The detestable and in- 
human ugliness of the places we give him to live in has 
soaked into him, and he is all out of gear, he does not 
know why. There was little industrial unrest, we are 
told, a generation ago. Now shorter hours and a poor 
modicum of education, we hear it said, have only left 
him at the mercy of the “agitator.’”’ It is the con- 
demnation of the industrial system of thirty years ago 
that there was no unrest. It was then that these vile 
“rows” were built; they were the foul deposit of a 
system which left men content to live in surroundings 
only fit for beasts, for the sake of pay, of a bare sub- 
sistence. Human nature can never settle down to that 
and will assert itself, because God made men to live a 
man’s life. The agitators are not the trade-union 
leaders, but the unconquerable instincts of men. It is 


130 The Realism of Jesus 


no answer to say that when these people are given 
decent surroundings they turn them into a slum; very 
likely that will be the case with many of them for a 
long time to come, because our system has made them 
like that. God knows what they might have been but 
for us, and if there is only one here and there who 
can take advantage of such reparation as we can make 
to him, we must “take care not to despise one of these 
little ones.” Meanwhile we can never hope for assured 
peace—there can be none—until every man has a rea- 
sonable opportunity of a life with some beauty in it as 
well as of mere existence. We should be thankful for 
an unrest which shows that human nature is not yet 
crushed by a tyranny of a system. 

What can be really learnt from birds and flowers? 
God feeds the birds and dresses the flowers, and we, 
too, need maintenance and beauty; we cannot with 
immunity starve ourselves or other people of either. 
Jesus does not tell us to try and be like birds and 
flowers; the effort would only make us ridiculous. 
Certainly, as things are, we can never hope to live as 
carelessly as the birds or as gaily as the flowers. Why 
tell us then to “study” the wild birds and “learn a 
lesson from’ the lilies? The ornithologist tells us that 
the birds do make preparation for the future; certainly, 
very many of them fly away from the winter. It must 
be remembered that Jesus was an artist, not a scientific 
observer ; nor was He specially interested in birds and 
flowers for their own sake; He was content with in- 
stinctive impressions. The man who is passionately 
fond of nature study and largely indifferent to the 
human nature about him would have scant sympathy 


Necessities and Luxuries 181 


from Him. People have found fault with Paul be- 
cause he said “Doth God care for oxen?” Here, as 
usual, his instinct was right, though his method of 
expression may have been unfortunate. If God is the 
Father of Whom Jesus spoke, His chief concern must 
always be His children. Jesus puts it in all kinds of 
ways: “How much better is a man than a sheep?” 
“Are you not much better than birds?’ “Not a spar- 
row falls to the ground ... the very hairs of your 
head are all numbered.” Though the home of the 
Lord’s spirit was with nature, His thoughts were 
always with men and women. In the silence of the 
Galilean hills He prayed for the people sleeping in the 
crowded towns below. On the lake a sharp, easy, 
casual word is enough to quiet the winds and waves; 
His concern is with the disciples and their condition. 
There is very little “cosmic emotion” in the Gospels, 
and Shakespeare, whose nature-poetry provides simply 
an effective background for the busy life of men, is 
nearer to the mind of Jesus than Wordsworth. His 
thought of men is perfectly expressed in that glorious 
hymn, which for some inscrutable reason has been left 
out of our Methodist hymn-book; they are “flowers of 
God’s heart.”’ 

The close observer will tell us that many birds starve 
in the winter, and it is quite likely that someone will 
criticise the Gospels on the ground that birds have been 
known to mope, that they get worried sometimes. 
That would not trouble us; it is still generally true that 
provision is made for the birds and that there is an 
atmosphere of gaiety about all their proceedings. They 
cater for their young ones, but always sing most mer- 


132 The Realism of Jesus 


rily in the busy season. We can learn from birds and 
flowers just to be ourselves without strain or self- 
importance, that the provision which God makes for 
us, whether of food or clothing, whether of that which 
feeds the body or that which sustains the soul, is ever 
so much more satisfying than any we can contrive by 
our own exertions. We have a native right to beauty, 
and were born not simply to keep ourselves and those 
whom God has given us alive, but to satisfy our un- 
conquerable instinct for the artistic expression of all 
that He has put into us. Only it is the same in this 
department of life as in so many others; the more we 
worry about providing ourselves with the means of 
beauty or self-expression, the uglier and more futile 
we become, just as the more we think about our dig- 
nity, the less we have. We are not to get anxious 
about ourselves, how to make ends meet or—as most 
of us are more likely to be tempted to do—how we are 
going to afford the new suit or new costume we want 
so badly; we are not to be ambitious to distinguish 
ourselves, to shine by our accomplishments or our re- 
fined tastes, but to learn the lesson from birds and 
flowers that the most beautiful things are always the 
most natural, the least affected or conscious of their 
beauty. The birds work for their living, but only 
make a song about’ it in one sense of the phrase, not in 
the other. The flowers do not make or choose their 
own clothes, yet even Solomon at his most gorgeous— 
when, for instance, he met the Queen of Sheba—would 
look offensively vulgar and overdressed, if judged by 
the standards set by the commonest of wild flowers. 
The Syrian peasant still calls the lilies which carpet 


Necessities and Luxuries 1383 


the fields about his village in the early spring “common 
grass,” and flings them contemptuously into the village 
oven, in which the housewives take turns to bake their 
bread. God cares for beauty, all artistry comes by His 
inspiration, and He made everything beautiful in its 
own way; because you have to work so hard and 
scheme so much, all the more for that reason are you 
precious to your Father, who has not made some things 
and people to be useful, and others beautiful, but every- 
thing and everybody to be both. The natural creation, 
like the ninety-nine good people “who need no re- 
pentance,’”’ can more or less be left to look after itself; 
the “one lost sheep’ of humanity has more than its 
share of the Father’s heart. For the necessary “lux- 
uries” of life, as for what are called its necessities, we 
have to depend in the last resort, not upon what we 
can get for ourselves, but upon the fact that our Father 
knows we need all these things, 


xX 
“Seek Ye First” 


IF all that Jesus has said about the design of God 1s 
true, it is certain that life ought not to be as drab as 
it is; it is not true that the best and most devout people 
are also the best company, as by the theory of v. 33 
they surely ought to be. If concentration of thought 
and desire upon the life of service and devotion means, 
as Jesus says, that all the things of which He has been 
speaking in the verses before—food for the body, 
peace of mind, the satisfaction of our natural craving 
for a full and beautiful life—come our way without 
effort, the Christian ought not only to be the most 
earnest, but the happiest, the most secure and most 
attractive of men. We take it for granted that the life 
of entire self-surrender involves a giving-up of many 
beautiful and quite innocent interests, and our idealisa- 
tion of pain and sacrifice has affected not only the man- 
ners and speech, but even the dress of very many good 
people. Christians are not so drab or dull as outsiders 
suppose them to be, for they generalise from a few 
melancholy instances, but the impression that we are 
out against natural joy is so widespread in the thought 
of the average man as well as in our literature, from 
Dickens downwards, that we ought to ask ourselves the 
question, is there any justification at all for what 1s, on 
134 


“Seek Ye First” 135 


the whole, unquestionably an unfair judgment? I do 
not believe that we can escape the conclusion that the 
religious public in the mass does not do credit to the 
Master’s teaching about beauty. Proverbs are pro- 
verbially unfair, but generally contain some grains of 
truth; it ought not to be possible still to say or think 
“Heaven for climate, and hell for company,” as most 
of us have done after association with those who are 
unmistakably good people. There is no escaping the 
fact that Christian men and women are not popular, 
and that this is not always due to their unpopular 
opinions. 

There is no doubt that Jesus never dreamed that 
His disciples would accept either pain or gloom as the 
price to be paid for a place in His service. “If I find 
Him, if I follow, what his guerdon here? Many a 
labour, many a sorrow, many a tear’? would not, one 
thinks after reading the sixth of Matthew, be accepted 
by Him as an interpretation of the life to which He 
called men. He came with good news, to find Him was 
to come upon hidden treasure, even hardship and per- 
secution borne for His sake was to be a source of ex- 
ultation, His yoke was to be easy to wear, His burden 
no burden at all. I suggest with some diffidence that 
too much has been made of the saying about taking up 
the cross. I am inclined to think that what He said 
originally was “let him take up My yoke and follow 
Me.” It was not His custom to use phrases which 
His disciples could not possibly understand, and surely 
before the Cross they could not have the slightest idea 
what taking up the cross meant. In Rome, where 
Mark’s Gospel was written, slaves were whipped to the 


136 The Realism of Jesus 


cross with a yoke upon their necks; it is easy to see 
how, after Calvary, the cross, already associated with 
the yoke in the minds of Mark’s readers, might take 
the place of the more natural and likely “yoke.” Jesus 
certainly never attempted to slur over the fact that to 
follow Him would mean the extremest self-denial— 
indeed He emphasised the severity of His claim to 
utter surrender in a hundred ways—but all the same 
He came to add something to us, not primarily to take 
away. He re-enforces the authority of the decalogue, 
but for Himself never utters a “Thou shalt not’; even 
the golden rule, known already in the negative form, 
‘Do not to others what you would not have them do 
to you” is made positive. “I came that they might 
have life, and have enough and to spare.”” The friends 
of Jesus cannot fast when He is with them; they 
should fast when He was to be taken away, but those 
days are over now. The word that applies to us is “I 
with you all the days.” 

I cannot help thinking that we have not learnt what 
He really meant by “Seek ye first His Kingdom and 
His righteousness.” We have interpreted the words 
“His Kingdom” as meaning some consummation for 
which we long with hope ever-deferred, and “His 
righteousness” as an inward perfection which seems to 
be for ever becoming less possible for us. But He is 
Himself the Kingdom, and He is our righteousness; to 
be persecuted ‘“‘for righteousness’ sake” and for His 
sake is the same thing. Partisans of a cause are often 
very dull people, however good the cause may be, while 
lovers are always interesting: ‘‘all the world loves a 
lover.” The essentially Christian thing is not our 


“Seek Ye First” 137 


devotion to an ideal—all earnest people share that with 
us—not even the aspiration after perfection—but just 
love to the person of Jesus. That involves devotion to 
the cause and the constant pursuit of a higher and 
deeper inward life, it is true, but the balance is altered. 
We possess Jesus, we do not yet see all things subject 
to Him, nor have we been already made perfect; but 
the predominant fact, that to which we swing back 
again from all reactions, can be, even now, not what we 
long for, but what we have. It is true that to the man 
who is in love with his Lord, all other things are added. 
To prove this, we can only fall back upon experience. 
As long as Jesus has been real enough to us to be the 
constant subject of our thought, the centre on which 
our mind falls back when its attention is not needed 
for other things, we have been provided for; the right 
word has come when it was needed, the mind has been 
kept fresh, the fear of a breakdown of health or of the 
failure of our power to provide for those for whom we 
are responsible has been taken from us, we have come 
into a treasure of beauty in nature, in art and poetry, 
in married love, and in the company of friends—all 
these good things have become available for us and 
have taken a new meaning because He has been central 
to them all. When, on the other hand, we have been 
less conscious of Him, doubts and fears have slipped 
back, devotion has been difficult, service most labori- 
ous; disappointment has soon told upon us then, and 
we have become bad company to ourselves and others, 
for the dulness and heaviness which seems to be the 
normal state of many people in middle life has come 
down upon us. 


138 The Realism of Jesus 


The ideal suggested here is by no means an attempt 
to forget the painful facts of life or to substitute 
ecstasy for intellectual honesty. Any kind of effort to 
carry out the Sermon on the Mount must inevitably 
commit the disciple to a refusal to rest content with 
things as they are, and this means unrest within and 
opposition without. This may be taken for granted; 
but the point is, does God Our Father mean us to carry 
the burden of obedience without the exhilaration which 
the realised presence of the Master alone can bring? 
To be perpetually working for a Kingdom which never 
seems to come any nearer, to be continually striving 
after an ideal which recedes as we advance, is not and 
cannot be exhilarating; it is not a natural condition for 
God’s creatures, for in His world all things are full 
of health and gladness, and fulfil the law of their being. 
The common man revolts against religious people not 
because they are good—his very phrase “a white man” 
shows that he loves goodness—but because they do not 
seem to be natural, they appear to him to live a strained 
and thwarted existence. Undoubtedly the Christian 
life can never be really easy—perhaps it was never 
meant to be—but do we not make it harder than it need 
be when we leave out, or consign to the occasional 
experience, what He said was to be the secret source of 
all our strength, a transporting and compensating ex- 
perience of the living Christ? To distinguish between 
the human and divine in Him, to talk of the “Jesus of 
history’ and “the Christ of experience,” is, to the lover 
of his Lord, to make an unreal and unnecessary differ- 
entiation; it is just Jesus, the Jesus who comes alive 
as he pores over the Gospels or thinks of Him as he 


“Seek Ye First’ 139 


sits dreaming over the fire at night, the Jesus who 
makes disappointment bearable, who is Himself the 
only answer we can give to all the perplexing problems 
of life within and without us. When we can say “Yes, 
all that you say is true; but I have Him,” then we shall 
have a message of enrichment, not of deprivation, we 
shall be able to face all the facts and meet all opposi- 
tion unflinchingly, for whether we lose faith in our- 
selves and our ideal or not, we shall always be sure of 
Him, and with Him the ideal will come to life again; 
love will bring us back to faith and hope. 


XXI 
His Life of Trust and Our Distrustfulness 


We may fancy that at this point of the Sermon 
Jesus became conscious that the crowds He had left 
at the foot of the hill had discovered His retreat, so 
that His audience was no longer the small circle of 
His attached disciples. That large numbers were pres- 
ent at the end of the discourse is clear from the evan- 
gelist’s comment: “It came to pass that the crowds 
were astonished at His teaching.” He lifts His eyes 
and sees them drifting up the hill, and the pity which 
never failed to move Him when He saw a “harassed 
and dejected” company of tired people comes into His 
voice. How could they be expected not to worry? 
They had all they could do to make ends meet and keep 
alive. A beautiful life seemed to be out of the range 
of possibility for them. So He gives them a piece of 
very homely advice, shrewd and practical, but with a 
world of truth behind it. “If you must worry, do not 
worry any more than you must. Every day brings its 
own burden of care, I know,’’ as who should know 
better than He, who had been brought up amongst 
them—‘“let to-morrow look after itself,” for “one day’s 
trouble at a time is as much as you can manage.” The 
only way to make a life of incessant care and toil toler- 


able is to take it in daily instalments. 
140 


His Life of Trust and Our Distrustfulness 141 


This maxim might seem at first sight to be simply 
a fragment of proverbial philosophy with little bearing 
upon our deeper problems. As a matter of fact, we 
have only to examine Our Lord’s teaching a little more 
closely to see that it runs down into the very texture of 
His thoughts about God and man. It recurs constantly 
in different forms: in the .Lord’s prayer, “Give us to- 
day our food for the coming day’; in “Let him take 
up his cross daily”; in “Ask, and it shall be given you,” 
and in many other places. One of the secrets of the 
Christian’s peace is to be found in the fact that, led by 
the Good Shepherd and followed by goodness and 
mercy, he need not look before and after. That Jesus 
Himself lived by the day is proved by very many sug- 
gestions in the Gospels. His brothers taunt Him with 
unwillingness to go up to a feast in Jerusalem and take 
the risk of publicity; He says He does not intend to 
go, then changes His mind and goes. He is always 
busy, but will never let Himself be hurried because He 
must get somewhere in a given time; so He is at 
leisure to give Himself undistractedly to a chance 
encounter, like that with the woman on the way to 
Jairus’ house, or with the woman of Samaria. His 
brothers, He told them, lived by schedule; their time 
was “always ready,’ arranged beforehand. So was 
the goal of His journey, for “the Son of Man is going 
on His way as was appointed for Him,” but till the 
hour of destiny came He was content to wait and feel 
His way from point to point. The most signal in- 
stance of His refusal to take anxious thought of the 
morrow, His habit of taking everything in its turn, 
comes on the eve of His passion, when He succeeds in 


142 The Realism of Jesus 


the upper room in giving Himself altogether to the 
task of comforting and supporting His friends, while 
He shuts the door, save for a momentary disturbance 
when Judas goes out, upon whatever the next hour was 
to bring. As one day’s food will not do for to-mor- 
row, so He lived by a constantly renewed obedience and 
a trust confirmed by the knowledge that so far each 
day’s demand had been met. 


“THis love in times past forbids me to think 
He’ll leave me at last in trouble to sink; 
And each Ebenezer I have in review 
Confirms His good pleasure to bring me quite through.” 


All very true and beautiful, we say, but life is a 
more complicated business than these easy theories 
allow. If we were as sure of God as Jesus was, or if 
other people could not thwart what we presume are His 
purposes, it might be possible to live this undistracted, 
unhurried life. As to the other people who hinder us, 
Jesus deals with our relations with them later on. 
Here we are concerned with the first difficulty—that 
we cannot think of God, no matter how we preach to 
ourselves or study birds and flowers, as He did. We 
have left out one verse which may be said to lay bare 
the secret of our trustlessness; if we cannot trust God 
as He did it is because we cannot see Him; and we 
cannot see Him, not because He is not everywhere 
about us, but because there is a darkness in our spirits 
which was not in Jesus. In the cottage where He was 
brought up the lamp was never allowed to go out at 
night; if by any mischance it did go out, the darkness 
would be quite intolerable to the inmates of the house, 


His Life of Trust and Our Distrustfulness 143 


for they were utterly unaccustomed to it. But the lamp 
was simply a bowl of oil, and very much would depend 
on the quality of the oil used. If the oil was pure, 
there would be a flame clear enough to keep the little 
room reasonably well lit; if it was of indifferent qual- 
ity, as it must often have been in the peasant cottage, 
it would flicker and smoke, and make the dark shadows 
in the recesses of the room more menacing. Through- 
out the Bible there runs the horror of the dark; even 
the fishermen on the lake, we are told, burn oiled rags 
at night, partly to attract the fish, but also because they 
dread unrelieved darkness. God has set a light within 
us, says Jesus, by which alone the world about us can 
look in the least like a home. “The lamp that lights 
up or plunges into darkness your outward life is your 
eye’—in other words your way of looking out at the 
things and the people about you; as we should say, 
your outlook upon life. “If your outlook is generous” 
—that is the secondary meaning of the word translated 
“single’—all your outward life will be radiant; if it is 
churlish and grudging, the world about you will look 
dark indeed. If the light of natural good nature, of 
human feeling, burns smokily or goes out, of course 
the darkness will appal you. 

We were very much at home in the world once, but 
now the world does not look to us the kind of place 
in which we can live the life of simple trustfulness, not 
so much because the world is wrong—it is, largely 
because it is made up of people like ourselves—as 
because something has gone wrong with is. It is partly 
the world’s fault, but not altogether. When Jesus talks 
of birds and flowers, the sunshine and the rain, we 


144 The Realism of Jesus 


think of cholera, blackwater fever and famine; when 
He talks of fathers giving good gifts to their children, 
we think—how can we help it?—of fathers giving 
curses and blows to their children. Life, we say, looks 
like the clear fresh picture which Jesus paints, only in 
patches, in specially selected instances. And this partly 
because we have an unnatural bias towards thinking 
the worst of life; we ignore the happiness and take it 
for granted, but the darker side we can never forget. 
This only proves that we, like the peasants of Syria; 
are more accustomed to the sunshine than the dark. 
It is not altogether satisfactory to say that cholera 
and a drunken father—to take our two instances 
together for the moment—are part of the human com- 
plex, for the chief reason why we cannot think rightly 
of God is that we do not think rightly of man. We are 
made, and the world we live in is so made, that our 
outlook upon man reacts upon our thought of God and 
of ourselves. That is one of the many reasons why 
we should hold fast to the real humanity of Jesus, for 
we can never set a proper value upon human nature 
until we see its strength and beauty in Him. We per- 
petually underestimate the goodness of the average man 
and woman. We talk of the degeneracy of the times; 
then war comes, and thousands of the people we have 
been ignorantly denouncing march to their death for 
us. A year or two later we are again dilating upon the 
sins of these same young people! We chatter about 
the decay of parental love, and one visit to the parks 
on any fine Saturday in any town would show to us, 
if it were not too common to be noticed, hundreds of 
young fathers giving their leisure time, with unweary- 


His Life of Trust and Our Distrustfulness 145 


ing patience and good humour, to the children, who 
take it all for granted like the rest of us. If the world 
was as bad as we sometimes affect to think we could 
not sleep o’ nights. There is something pitifully mean 
in the spectacle of men whining about the times with 
the comfort and security around them which are only 
possible because the world has been kinder to them 
than they deserve. “If the light that is in you,” if the 
natural good humour you were born with, has given 
place to darkness, how great is the darkness? A little 
thoughtful observation can help us a good deal in this 
matter, but when all is said that can be said by way of 
relief there are darker mysteries behind the common 
humanities of workaday life on which we have no light 
as yet. Jesus will help us to explore them, and has an 
answer to our last and most unescapable forebodings, 
if we will be patient. While we wait to see what His 
answer is, we can prepare to listen by reminding our- 
selves once again that, whatever virtue seems unnatural 
to men, our very language, when we speak of “human- 
ity,’ proves to us at least that it is natural to be trustful 
and kind. The Cross would not have happened as it 
did if Jesus could have got men to themselves, away 
from their parties and cliques; all but He were caught 
in the machine, and so He was able to say, when we 
had done our worst, “Father, forgive them; for they 
know not what they do.” 


CHAPTER XXII 
What are We to do with Our Critical Faculty? 


WE have discussed our Lord’s picture of His new 
way of life in some detail now, and at every turn have 
been impressed with its perfect naturalness, simplicity, 
and beauty. But all the while, even when for the 
moment carried away from our bearings by the glort- 
ous persuasiveness of Jesus, we are conscious of what 
the Friends call “a stop in our minds.’ Granted that 
it is true, as Mr. G. K. Chesterton has said, that, 
though the first time you read the Sermon on the 
Mount you feel that it turns everything upside down, 
the second time you read it you discover that it has 
turned everything rightside up, yet we cannot get it 
into focus somehow; only in very exalted moods do 
we ever fancy the whole of it possible for us. If we 
are one way up, and the man described by Jesus is the 
other way up, how are we ever to twist ourselves about 
so as to be able to see life from His angle? It does not 
help us much to tell us that we were like that when we 
were children, or even that we have sometimes been 
like that since. We can never be children again for 
long, nor can we count upon the continuance or the 
recurrence of the great moment. Sometimes the ideal 
of Jesus seems quite near, as if, when we turned the 


next corner, our working life might look to us as it 
146 


What are We to do with Our Critical Faculty? 147 


looked to Him; but the moment passes, something 
happens to disenchant us, or someone breaks in upon 
us who cannot be made to fit in with the scheme, and 
we drop back into our normal critical and suspicious 
selves. Jesus goes on to deal with some of our doubts 
and questions, and we will hear what He says next 
before we take a wider survey. 

Undoubtedly our power of criticising things and 
people is given us by God; even Satan, the arch-critic, 
was originally one of the “sons of God.” Elsewhere 
Jesus expostulates with His enemies for their lack of 
critical judgment; ‘why do you not of your own selves 
judge what is right?” and in another place, “Judge not 
according to appearance, but pass a righteous judgment 
(upon the facts before you).” We might infer that our 
critical faculty should rather be exercised upon things 
than upon people, but this would perhaps be too sweep- 
ing. Our great safeguard is to have a reasoned con- 
viction of our own liability to critical assault, for the 
world treats us, in the long run, as we treat the world. 
Jesus illustrates from the thrust and parry of the car- 
penter’s shop when splinters were flying; it is because 
we have a whole log in our own eye that we see so 
much wrong with our brother’s. 

Experience with ourselves inclines us to be sceptical 
of the possibility of ideal virtue to start with. Still 
more distorting is the bias towards believing the worst 
which comes from the evil in ourselves of which we 
are not aware. Dark indeed looks the world outside to 
the man the windows of whose soul are darkened, and 
this is more or less true of all of us. “Judge not your 
friends,” said one of the Rabbis, “till you come into his 


148 The Realism of Jesus 


place’; but to very few is given an imagination sympa- 
thetic enough to enable us to do this by anticipation, 
and, when we do find ourselves actually in the same 
position, it is generally too late. Again, we are left 
with the question, how are we to get our perspective 
right, how are we to cast the log out of our own eye? 
“If your eye is your hindrance,” says Jesus, “pluck it 
out and cast it from you’’; but how are we to do that? 
We shall be in a better position to answer this question 
if we approach it through what remains of the Sermon: 

We may notice here that the positive exercise of the 
critical faculty has a distinct place in the scheme of 
Christian conduct of which the outline is given us in 
the Sermon. By the positive exercise of this faculty 
I mean all that our word “tact” suggests, and some- 
thing more which for want of a better word we may 
call considerateness, a habit of determining how we 
shall approach a man, not so much by a far-sighted 
regard for our own interest, as by our critical appraise- 
ment of the bent of his mind. Most of us remember 
the intensity with which we resented the sarcasm of 
the schoolmaster who loved to be witty at our expense; 
the remembrance should make us careful in the use of 
our sense of humour. Jesus was never sarcastic at the 
expense of simple-minded people, only when He had 
to do with Rabbis and educated Pharisees; if we can 
judge from the Talmud, the Rabbis were very shrewd 
and witty themselves. Some might call His treatment 
of the Syro-Phoenician woman teasing, but at any rate 
she was well able to take her own part in a battle of 
wits. The tactful man restrains himself when an 
opportunity of scoring a neat point is given him, be- 


What are We to do with Our Critical Faculty? 149 


cause he is afraid the other man may be able to give 
him a Roland for his Oliver; the Christian gentleman 
because he knows he cannot. So with our frivolity 
generally; we shall do well to be serious with dull peo- 
ple, and only give our pleasantry free rein in the com- 
pany of friends who know us well enough not to 
imagine that there may be more in what we say than 
appears on the surface. People without humour them- 
selves are merely bewildered by flippancy ; we must not 
despise them or take a pleasure in the exposure of their 
dulness, for that is bullying. We must adapt our tone 
to our knowledge or ignorance of the kind of person 
with whom we have to deal, and this is where the criti- 
cal faculty should come in. 

The next verse is enough to show us that Jesus is 
under no illusions about some of those with whom we 
have to work. He was no credulous optimist; His 
parables are enough to show this. What a portrait- 
gallery of very life-like but very unideal people we 
have there! The rich fool, whose sole idea of happi- 
ness is to have a good meal all by himself, who gloats 
over the prospect of keeping everybody else away from 
his ghoulish merriment; the sly dog of a steward who 
pulls the strings so cleverly; the prodigal son who 
spends his father’s money before the time when it 
would come to him in the course of nature, and only 
comes home when he has no more and is hungry; the 
elder brother who will not recognise the scapegrace, 
but yet deigns to be jealous of him; the man who will 
not get up till he is compelled, to help a friend in an 
emergency; the judge who is more careful of his dig- 
nity than of the justice he is well paid to administer— 


150 The Realism of Jesus 


they are not criminal characters, but they are certainly 
not noble ones. Of course there is the good Samaritan 
on the other side, and the father of the prodigal, but 
there again Jesus is true to nature; He does not paint 
angels, but men. He knows it is natural to be kind and 
to welcome a lost son home, to render first-aid to a man 
lying on the roadside; but He also knows how greedy 
we are for pleasure, how ready to be jealous, how busy 
about our little dignities, how little we like to be both- 
ered, how we resent the intrusion of uncongenial peo- 
ple into our preserves. He knows us inside out, and 
His irony is never far away from tears, yet He never 
gives a hint that He thought us small or mean because 
we do small and mean things. Even His invective 
against the Pharisaic scribes is rather a dirge over the 
incalculable mischief done by the sins of good people, 
that corruption of the best which is ever the worst, than 
a scorn which takes delight in seeing its victims wince. 


XXIII 
On Reverence 


It is difficult for us to believe that Jesus could bring 
Himself to call any human beings by the opprobrious 
title of dogs and swine. The Syro-Phcenician woman 
is not called a dog, though her daughter seems to 
be called a “puppy.” Children in Syrian homes are 
still allowed to make pets of very young dogs, but they 
are turned out into the street when they emerge from 
puppyhood. After that they are, of course, mere scav- 
engers, without a home or an owner. “They make a 
noise like a dog, and go round about the city”; “even 
the dogs came and licked his sores.” There was only 
one more deadly insult than to call a man a dog, and 
that was to call him a pig, and Jesus uses both these 
words here. It is inconceivable that He meant Gen- 
tiles; Paul apparently calls anti-Christian Jews “the 
dogs” in Philippians iii. 2, but his employment of the 
word gives us no real parallel to its use here. 

But we do find that Jesus is not by any means averse 
from calling men by animal epithets ; we have “wolves,” 
“sheep,” “goats,” “snakes,” all applied to human beings 
in the Gospel. There is a curious parallel to be found 
in King Lear; Dr. Bradley suggests that during the 
period when he wrote the great tragedies, Shakespeare 


was haunted by the idea that men may be possessed by 
I51 


152 The Realism of Jesus 


what we call the “animal” sins. Our Lord tells ws) 
plainly and bluntly that there will always be dirty- 
minded people about, cynical, scandalmongering out- 
siders who will make the most of any bit of unsavoury 
gossip which comes their way. We are not to be alto- 
gether free and unreservedly friendly in all companies ; 
we shall be well-advised not to give interviews to enter- 
prising journalists, where the question at issue reflects 
upon the character of Christian people. We shall be 
careful of one another’s honour, never telling tales out 
of school or washing our dirty linen in public; for we 
know that if we discuss each other’s character too indis- 
criminately, those who listen with such sinister eager- 
ness to our confidences will trample our treasure in the 
dirt; then, when our backs are turned, they will take 
away our character with equal relish and thoroughness ; 
nor have any of us much character to lose. If we 
were treated as roughly as we sometimes treat each 
other, we should be unrecognisable when the process 
was over. There is an interesting parallel to this say- 
ing in the Book of Sirach: ‘‘Talk not much with a fool, 
and consort not with a pig; beware of him, lest thou 
have trouble, and thou art defiled when he shaketh him- 
self” (Ecclesiasticus xxii. 13 [Hebrew text]); two 
other passages from the same book are worth quoting 
in this connexion: “Hast thou heard something, let it 
die with thee; be of good courage; it will not burst 
thee!’’; “He that is hasty in reposing confidence is 
unwise . . . never repeat a word—then no one can 
reproach thee, speak not of it to friend or foe—unless 
it be a sin to thee, repeat it not” (xix. 4, 5, 10). 

At this point we may, if we will, insert an unwritten 


On Reverence 1538 


saying of Jesus, which underlies Jas. iv. 17 and per- 
haps 1 Cor. ix. 16, and is quoted in different forms 
by Justin and Ireneus; Ephrem, the Syrian father, 
cites it as from Tatian’s harmony of the Gospels in the 
form “he who does not preach, commits a sin.” The 
two sayings taken together mean, ‘‘you must preach, 
but be careful how you preach.” It is probable, I think, 
that for “holy thing” we should read “signet-ring”— 
only a very slight change is necessary in the suggested 
Aramaic original; the “ring’’ corresponds much more 
nearly with the “pearls” in the second part of the verse. 
Did Jesus distinguish between the sacred and the secu- 
lar? Quite a number of people are inclined to say 
“No” and to argue that the differentiation is an alto- 
gether mistaken one. Certainly an extreme emphasis 
upon such a distinction has led to many gross abuses, 
providing, for instance, an excuse for that shallow 
catchword “No politics in the pulpit.” But when we 
say that Jesus made all life sacramental, all that we 
mean is: “He made our common life so sacred by 
sharing it witn us that there is nothing that may not 
at any given moment become sacramental’’—by ‘“‘sacra- 
mental’ I mean expressive of a sacred personal rela- 
tionship. We do not infer that all material things are 
equally capable of flashing and glowing with the glory 
of a great spiritual reality. The world, Jesus asserts, 
is everywhere alive with God; He does not go on to 
say with the Pantheist that it is everywhere equally 
alive with God. “Every common bush” if you will; 
but it is quite possible that Jesus would have been more 
interested and would have seen more in the people who 
“sit round it and pluck blackberries” than in the bush. 


154 The Realism of Jesus 


A bootlace will not do for an engagement ring; it 
might for a time if there were no more fitting symbol 
at hand, just as a common nickel ring has served love’s 
turn before now. There is a use for costly things, for 
gold and silver and jewels; they should not be too lav- 
ishly displayed, but kept as tokens of some precious 
spiritual possession which nothing that is not expensive 
can at all adequately represent. That is what costly 
things are meant for, not for personal display, but for 
the great occasion, for which nothing drab or common- 
place will do. I need not refer to the classical instance 
of the alabaster box of precious spices, or to the re- 
proof administered by Jesus Himself to the utilitarian 
critic at Bethany. 

Christian reverence always has behind it this per- 
sonal meaning consciously realised. The “Church” is 
not the building where the Church meets—there is good 
reason for calling that the “Chapel,” if “meeting- 
house” is too prosaic for our taste—but the fellowship 
of believers who meet for worship there; it is not 
“God’s house,” for He does not dwell in ‘temples made 
by human hands’—the last “house of God” was the 
Temple at Jerusalem, and it ceased to be “God’s house” 
when Jesus said “It is your house now, and you must 
keep it” (leaving out ‘desolate,’ which is not found 
in the best MSS. either of Matt. xxiii, 38, or Luke xiii, 
35), and forthwith left the doomed building (Matt. 
Xxiv. I, 2), doomed because He left it for the last 
time. Ever since then we—‘“our bodies’—are the 
Temple of the Holy Spirit. The idea so widely spread 
amongst trustees and other custodians of Church 
buildings that the premises are not to be used too much 


On Reverence 155 


is not a Christian notion at all—it may be Jewish or 
pagan, but it finds no warrant in the New Testament; 
the building is made for the people, not the people for 
the building. Even in what we are accustomed to call 
the “sacraments,” the real sacrament is the communion 
of saints with their Lord and with one another, not the 
altar at which they kneel or the bread and wine; strictly 
speaking, no one can administer the sacraments. With 
all deference to many devout Christians, the ills in mod- 
ern Church life cannot be set right by what they call 
“reverence’—seemly and altogether desirable as that 
may be for other reasons—rather by a far more deeply- 
rooted respect for other believers, and a new care for 
the honour of the Church which God bought with the 
blood of His own, and which is the true body of Christ. 

All the same, certain things will always be more 
suitable as expressions of devotion than others. All 
life is sacred since He has walked our way— 


“Sacred is the soil 
Dear are the hills of God.” 


We may meet Him on the mountain-top or by the 
roadside, when we walk together and are sad; we may 
see Him walking over the water, moving steadily on to 
His Kingdom amid the unrest of our times; we may be 
seated at table with our friends, never dreaming that 
He is anywhere near, and suddenly we may know that 
it is He who is breaking the bread, the soul of all good 
company, for He is “the goodly fere,” the great com- 
panion; we may suppose that it is the gardener, then 
turn round, our attention caught by an unwonted tone 
in the rough voice, and see Him looking into our face, 


156 The Realism of Jesus 


and calling us by our name; but He chose His symbols 
carefully, and there is a reason why bread and wine 
stand to us for the body and blood of the Lord. These 
are love-tokens which we shall not be inclined to handle 
every day and in all companies. We shall not quote 
His words too freely, using them as tags for our smart 
talk, or merely to score a point in argument. It is easy 
to do so, for they are familiar and strangely relevant 
in all kinds of contexts. That is because every trifling 
detail which has any sort of connexion with human 
life and love may, since He came amongst us, catch 
and reflect a gleam of the eternal. But we shall be 
careful never to let the familiarity and humanness of 
the words of Jesus, their native shrewdness and enliv- 
ening humour, tempt us to forget that they are His, 
that they are the words of eternal life. 


XXIV 
The Christian Adventure 


In verses 7-12 of chapter vii Jesus summarises His 
doctrine of God with inferences for the social life of 
man. God is our Father; unlike the gods of the 
heathen, He does not play practical jokes upon His 
children, for the things that He gives them are always 
good. We are to treat one another in the same spirit, 
entering without suspicion into that fellowship of giv- 
ing and taking upon which the life of man with God, 
and of man with man, depends. The disciple will not 
be afraid of making demands upon God, his fellows, 
and himself, because he knows that, for the man who 
is content to feel his way through, to venture upon God 
and the world God made, through every labyrinth there 
is a way, and sooner or later the way will be opened. 
He takes it for granted that God is worthy of his trust, 
and knows that men, too, are worth believing in, unless 
he is forced to suspect them; in return he is eager to 
deal humanly with men, as he expects them to deal 
humanly with him. That is all that Jesus asks from 
us, but how much it is! 

To begin with, trust in God; how difficult it is for 
us to venture on Him, to risk very much in the great 
speculation! Can we believe, as Jesus did in the wilder- 

1$7 


158 The Realism of Jesus 


ness, that when He seems to give us stones for bread, 
we are to make the best of the stones, until something 
better comes along? To have to listen to a preacher 
without a message, to have to make the best of Church 
socials when the spirit is crying out for fellowship, is 
the hard lot of many a disciple of Jesus, and he is sorely 
tempted to try and find what he wants elsewhere, in- 
stead of settling down to make the best of the people 
in the place to which God has sent him. It is not very 
comforting to tell him— 


“When the sermon is dull and the preacher lacks sense, 
God takes a text, and preaches patience,” 


but it is true that the things that come to us, when 
we are following the path of obedience, are not only 
good, but the best things possible for us. God may 
not give us what can by any stretch of imagination be 
called “bread’’ when we ask for it; at any rate, what 
He sends will either be good already, or capable of 
being turned into something good. To give ourselves 
up to inglorious and uncongenial work, to believe that 
when our friends shake their heads and talk about our 
throwing ourselves away, that He can keep our souls 
alive without “bread” if He chooses, is in itself an 
adventure, a perpetual taking of risks. 

It is equally hard for some of us to trust ourselves, 
to take up tasks which make a formidable demand upon 
powers which we suspect we were never meant to pos- 
sess. The wrong kind of modesty—we will not call it 
mock-modesty, for it is quite sincere—is a continual 
trouble in Church life to-day; the usual answer, when 
we are asked to undertake some special work, is “But 


The Christian Adventure 159 


you know that is not my line.” This is not Christian 
humility, but simply lack of trust in the power of the 
Spirit of God. “It is not you that speak, but the Spirit 
of your Father.’”’ God is far more ingenious in the 
adaptation of means to ends than is generally sup- 
posed; the call would not have come our way, unless 
some provision had already been made to fit us for the 
work which is offered to us. 

The problem “How far are we to trust other people’ 
raises so many difficult issues that it will be well to 
leave it alone for the moment; it is bound up with two 
other questions, “Did Jesus trust men always,” and 
“When we cannot trust men any longer, what then?’ 
We shall attempt a reply to these questions presently. 
Meanwhile we may observe that the ‘‘golden rule’”’ sums 
up very much of what we have been saying; if we 
should not like to have temptation or bad drains thrust 
in our children’s way, we are to see to it, so far as we 
can, that the children of the poor are not forced to live 
without sun and air in their homes, with fumes in the 
air and odours rising from the ground, all poisonous ; 
that they are given a chance to escape from the smell 
of alcoholic liquor. At least we can never rest content 
while such inequalities remain. And if we feel our- 
selves affronted when those above us in the social scale 
patronise us, we shall take care not to bribe the work- 
ing man to be quiet with the stone of high wages and 
short hours, and deny him the only thing he really asks 
for, the bread of an equal fellowship. But it is all so 
difficult, indeed it is quite impossible unless a whole 
world of prejudice, of traditional feeling and tempera- 
mental shyness has been crucified in us at the Cross of 


160 The Realism of Jesus 


Christ, unless nothing else really matters to us but 
Jesus. 

Is it too good to be true, this picture of the perfect 
life? Weare not simple, but complicated creatures liv- 
ing in a still more complicated world. The gate—that 
simple love of Jesus which is the source of it all—seems 
to be too narrow and unpretentious to lead anywhere 
very much, and we wonder “Did Jesus really take into 
account all the facts?” We remember that He, like 
us, lived amid a highly-developed civilisation, and, 
though He and His first disciples were poor men, the 
men and women they preached to would be harassed 
by most of our social entanglements. It is said that 
on the direct route from Jericho to Jerusalem there is 
a point at which it is easy to lose one’s way, for what 
appears to be the main road only takes one down into 
the valley of Gehenna; to reach the city gates you have 
to turn sharply to the left through a narrow wicket- 
gate and take a rough unlikely-looking path. If that 
is so, the topical reference contained in this parable of 
the two ways is obvious. The trouble with the phi- 
losophy of Jesus is that it does not look ambitious or 
comprehensive enough. Luke, in the corresponding 
passage, has “Agonise to enter through the narrow 
door .. . for many shall seek to enter in and shall 
not be able,” while Matthew has “gate” for “door,” 
and “few shall find it” for “many .. . shall not be 
able.” The difficulty, according to Luke’s report, does 
not consist in the discovery itself, but in availing ours 
selves of the discovery. Matthew is thinking of a gate 
leading to a road; Luke of a door to a house. At the 
beginning of the Christian life—if we follow Mat- 


The Christian Adventure 161 


thew’s version and regard the two as distinct sayings, 
as I am inclined to do—we have nothing to surmount 
except our disinclination to believe that the homely sug- 
gestions made by Jesus are adequate to our particular 
problem. Other and very formidable difficulties, we 
are warned, come later on, for the path, when the gate 
has been entered, is rough and troublesome; but the 
decisive crisis is passed when we have once brought 
ourselves to make the great experiment. The very fact 
that the approach to the way of life marked out in the 
Sermon looks so simple and unpretentious prevents 
many from making the venture; they think that there 
must be some other secret than mere love to Jesus 
and trust in the Heavenly Father to whom He has 
introduced us. We still hear of the ‘sublime impos- 
sibilities” of the Sermon on the Mount. Once the 
venture is made and the gate entered, a second great 
discouragement meets the seeker. The teaching of 
Jesus which at first sight looked so natural, complete, 
and satisfying as a theory of life, brings us up against 
all kinds of difficult and delicate problems when we be- 
gin to work and think it out in practice, and the way 
becomes troublesome indeed. Jesus Himself gives us 
the clue to their solution; we are to enter the gate 
without question as to where the road is going to take 
us, and then ask and feel our way, to take one step and 
live one day at a time, not to worry about problems 
till we are face to face with them, till some answer must 
be given to the questions they force upon us. The 
word we are to say will be given us when it is des- 
perately wanted, not before; the mountainous barrier 
will break and melt away when all our plans for scaling 


162 The Realism of Jesus 


or circumventing it have failed, and we are driven to 
trtist—commonly our last resort. We must not expect 
to get “full direction” at the beginning of our course, 
or ever to have in our possession a detailed chart of 
the way to the Kingdom; as the needful food is to be 
given us day-by-day, so the needed strength, the right 
word which we could never find if it were not put into 
our mouths, the bright, fresh illuminating idea, is not 
likely to be forthcoming until the time has come to 
use it. 


XXV 
“Other Foundation can no Man Lay” 


SUCH is the life of the Christian believer, called to be 
an adventurous wanderer along an unfrequently and 
tortuous path all his days. It is certainly quite as much 
of venture as ever. Jesus has already told us that, 
though we must train ourselves to make allowances 
for everybody, there are some people we must not trust 
too much, some companies in which we cannot be quite 
open and unreserved. Apart from the mischief-makers 
referred to in v. 6, there are propagandists of every 
kind, men and women complacently sure of their own 
creeds, who beckon us another way. If the wanton 
scandalmongers are labelled “dogs” and “‘swine,”’ these 
others are called with equal bluntness, “wolves mas- 
querading as sheep.”’ They profess themselves eager 
to learn, but their real purpose is to expose our sim- 
plicity and to increase their own self-importance. As 
Paul said of some of them: “It is all very well to have 
interest shown in you, when the motive is a good one;, 
but these people’s interest in you is unhealthy; its pur- 
pose is that they may monopolise you and that you may 
have by and by to curry favour with them” (Gal. iv. 
17, 18). The modern world, too, is full of propa- 
gandists, as greedy of spiritual influence as the profi- 


teer is of material wealth, and quite as unscrupulous 
163 


164 The Realism of Jesus 


as he; very dangerous, because very plausible and 
insinuating people. ‘You can tell what they are by 
the mischief they cause,” says Jesus. The intolerant 
partisan, who thinks he must put charity second to 
courage because he is fighting for what he calls “the 
truth,” proves that his doctrine is not true by the man- 
ner of his advocacy. The heresy-hunter is himself a 
heretic, but he reveals the fact not so much by what 
he says as by the way in which he says it. ‘A tree 
is known by its fruit’; if to be narrowly orthodox 
makes a man bitter and intolerant, or to be “advanced” 
makes him superior and contemptuous of the sim- 
plicity of heart he chooses to call credulity, we can 
only conclude that the orthodox man is not so orthodox 
as he thinks and that the advanced man is not advanced 
enough. Our bad manners in controversy too often 
rob our arguments of all their force. 

Then Jesus goes on to warn us of another and a 
subtler danger, a danger particularly insidious in days 
like these when a kind of vague homage to the person 
of our Lord is fashionable. Almost everybody quotes 
His words nowadays, and more respect is shown to 
His name than ever. But it is one thing to find sup- 
port for a theory, which we should hold on other 
grounds in any case, by the use or misuse of sayings 
of His; quite another to follow the way of self-for- 
getting love, whether we appreciate or understand the 
details of His teaching or not. We are all touched by 
Christian ideas, as we are all familiar with the language 
of ecstatic devotion; it is dangerously easy to imagine 
ourselves lovers of Jesus, because the mention of His 
Name rouses in us a certain emotional and pleasurable 


“Other Foundation can no Man Lay” 165 


response. In certain moods we can find what we call 
tather vaguely “uplift” in the atmosphere created by. 
the singing of hymns which express the rapture of the 
saints in the love of their Lord, and by the repetition 
and exchange of Christian sentiments ; indeed the num- 
ber of “helpful” addresses we have listened to and of 
“good times’ we have enjoyed would be portentous, 
if we kept a record of them all. It is possible to live 
on phrases, and the emotional reactions their repetition 
produces, and to think we are Christians because we 
can enjoy the company of the true lovers of Jesus and 
feel better—in what sense it is difficult to say—when 
the atmosphere about us is Christian. A slight tinc- 
ture of semi-Christian sentiment may prove, we should 
remember, the most effective prophylactic against in- 
fection by the real thing. True Christianity does not 
get into a man by saturation, by his soaking it from 
the air of home or Church; it is not to be bought 
ready-made to suit all sizes and shapes; if it is not our 
own possession, we can neither catch it from someone 
else, nor “go to them that sell,’ its professional ex- 
ponents, and get fitted in time to go in with the others 
into the wedding. It is nothing else than a direct and 
unmediated fellowship with the Lord Himself, an 
attachment, not to Christian ideas so much as to the 
person of Jesus, a willingness to take His word for it, 
though all the world and most of our own prejudices 
cry contradiction. It does not imply always a con- 
scious realisation of His presence—Jesus says nothing 
about that here—it does involve utter obedience to the 
will of the Father in Heaven declared by Him. No 
mystical experience, no Christian associations, can take 


166 The Realism of Jesus 


the place of this practical obedience to what the Chris- 
tian understands of the will of His Lord. | 
Jesus goes on to say a still more startling thing. 
It is possible to have been a successful evangelical 
preacher—for that is what “Have we not cast out 
demons’ may be taken as meaning in current religious 
language—and yet be disowned at last. They—these 
miracle-workers—make the claim, and the King does 
not challenge their claim. In Luke the reference is 
rather to privilege: “Have we not eaten and drank in 
Thy presence, and hast Thou not taught in our 
streets?’ Here the appeal is based not upon intimacy 
with the Lord, but upon services rendered to His cause. 
Yet the Lord, in whose name they have achieved their 
mighty work, repudiates them, without attempting to 
minimise the greatness of the sins they have done. 
In Luke’s Gospel His answer amounts to: “It does not 
matter to Me where you come from, what your posi- 
tion has been’’; in Matthew it is still more personal, 
“I never knew you.” There is one grain of comfort 
to be found even in this sombre warning; Jesus had 
faced the very perplexing difficulties that surround the 
whole subject of “visible results.” In the parable of 
the Sower He suggests that results quickly visible are 
often delusive, in that of the Seed growing secretly 
that invisible results always follow the preaching of the 
word; here He betrays His knowledge of the fact that 
the best men are often least successful, though they 
agonise for results, while men of inferior Christian 
character and experience carry all before them, and 
the fruits of their work abide. Because you have been 
a preacher successful in the best sense of the word, be- 


“Other Foundation can no Man Lay” 167 


cause you have done real good, it does not follow that 
you are Mine; you may go on doing good work, and 
yet the condition of your own soul may be such that 
I shall be obliged to disown all connexion with you. 
Does not this statement contradict what has just been 
said about the good tree and the good fruit? If the 
results are good, surely the preacher is proved genuine! 
But Jesus does not think of the preacher as responsible 
for the fruit; it is the seed which must produce its 
harvest. The “word” is the seed, the preacher is the 
sower ; if the sower does his work, some of the seed is 
sure to grow, but that does not depend so much upon 
the character of the sower as the nature of the soil and 
the goodness of the seed. When He says “‘the tree is 
known by its fruit,’ He is not thinking of preaching, 
but of character; we ought, I believe, to omit the ques- 
tion about “fruit” in the examination of candidates 
for the ministry. The amount of our success does not 
depend upon either the quality of our Christian char- 
acter or the intensity of our experience, but partly upon 
opportunity, partly upon certain faculties which are 
rather physical and mental than spiritual. Moreover, 
to emphasise the desirability of visible results so much 
at the beginning is unhealthy because it is out of line 
with the teaching of Jesus; He distinctly asserts that 
invisible results are more trustworthy than those that 
are visible, and that results do not, anyhow, testify to 
the character of the sower, rather to the quality of the 
ground and the purity of the seed. This does not mean 
that the character or the experience of the preacher is 
of no importance, but that the amount of the visible 
fruit has no direct relation to any spiritual quality of 


168 The Realism of Jesus 


the sower except his perseverance. As this is a fact 
of everyday observation, I need not labour it. But we 
must take to heart the Lord’s obvious meaning, that 
the fact that we have done so much or worked so long 
in the service does not by itself prove us His. 

In the parable which concludes the Sermon there 1s 
an interesting difference between Matthew and Luke. 
Luke is thinking of the broad river valleys of North 
Syria, round his native Antioch; the floods are not so 
serious as in the narrower Palestinian wady which 
Matthew has in mind—all that is needed is that the 
builder should dig deep and lay his foundation on the 
mother-rock. Matthew, on the other hand, is not so 
much concerned with the depth of the building’s foun- 
dations, or the trouble taken in laying them, as with the 
site. We are following the First Gospel, and as it 1s 
true to local conditions in Galilee we are fairly safe 
in assuming that we have here the most primitive ver- 
sion. The time for building is early summer. One 
man chooses a green and fertile valley of rich soil— 
one of the glens running down from the mountains of 
Upper Galilee to the lake. Galilee is exceedingly stony, 
and to get any depth of soil you would have to choose 
a narrow wady. The tenant would be sheltered there 
from the west winds which bring rain from the Med- 
iterranean; so without further thought he builds his 
cottage there, and as the last days of summer and then 
of autumn pass, he congratulates himself upon his 
well-chosen site. But he has not noticed the lie of the 
land. For a time all goes well; the winds do not touch 
him and even in the winter he is sheltered and warm. 
Snow falls on the hills above, but does not trouble him, 


“Other Foundation can no Man Lay” 169 


and his fields and fruit-trees bear a rich crop. But the 
dangerous time has still to come; the rainy season 
comes and goes, and then the first warm days of the 
early Syrian spring and the melting of the snow. Then 
one night silently and suddenly the great brown flood 
comes rushing down, but he is too heavily asleep to 
hear the falling of banks and barriers; he wakes in 
the darkness—the rain is pouring down, the house 
rocks, then there is a crash and a choking muddy tor- 
rent comes surging in through the broken swaying 
walls. Perhaps he succeeds in crawling out, bruised and 
broken by the fragments of his own house; naked and 
shivering, he scrambles up to higher ground, then turns 
back to look at the desolation which an hour ago was 
his home. In a few weeks the floods subside, another 
venturesome builder settles there, and the same tragedy 
recurs. How old the temptations of life are! Yet 
they are always trapping fresh victims; every day sees 
the wrecking of young lives through the same follies 
exposed a thousand times over! 

The other man chooses higher ground for his house 
—the land here is bleak and barren, with only a thin 
soil covering the bare rock. He is not heroic, but is 
just sensible; he lives in the same world as the foolish 
builder, but he takes obvious precautions, he sets about 
his work seriously, and the result is that his plain cot- 
tage sees the fall of house after house in the valley 
below. I am told that in the further East it is quite a 
common practice to put up a house for the summer 
months in a river bed; but woe to the man who lingers 
in his sheltered valley a week too long! Determinists 
tell us that we are the prey of our environment; Jesus 


170 The Realism of Jesus 


gives us the truth that underlies their contention when 
He says that if we build the house of our life on the 
wrong site a crash is inevitable. In the early years 
of life we make our own environment; in the later 
years the environment we have chosen makes us. This 
is very largely true; of course we are not free to 
choose our earliest surroundings; but out of the en- 
vironment for which we are not responsible we make 
an environment for which we are. We may be born 
in a slum, but we choose our friends, and people have 
more to do than things with making us what we 
become. Most of us set about building our soul-home 
out of any material which comes handy. The most im- 
portant thing is not the material we use—Paul says that 
on the true foundation we may build a house of gold 
and silver and decked with precious stones, or one of 
wood with its gaps stopped with hay and thatched with 
straw—but the site on which we build, the central 
reality round which we group the things and people we 
take into our life. 

What a portentous claim is here! Jesus has swept 
us right away from the details of conduct to eternal 
verities, and there, as the one central reality for every 
man in all the world He sets Himself—not the moral 
law revealed in Scripture, the value of which for all 
time He has already proclaimed—but His words and 
His words only. He is the bedrock of human life, 
which he who goes deep enough in penitence and prayer 
shall find. But not only is He the rock beneath the 
surface of life, the ground of the universe; not only iS 
He to be found in the earnest probing of the soul, when 
men are seeking for some solid ground to build and 


“Other Foundation can no Man Lay” 171 


risk all their fortunes upon. He is the Rock of Ages, 
rising above the surface of history, and those who have 
lost their bearings because they have built wrong can 
hide in the cleft of this rock which has weathered the 
storms of the ages. 

But for young and old alike, for those whose build- 
ing is still to be done and for those whose soul-home 
has collapsed, the one condition of security laid down 
by Jesus is that they should commit their fortunes to 
Him, that they should love before they understand or 
even guess where love will carry them. The religion 
He depicts to us is not based upon a sense of duty, not 
upon fineness of ethical perception or intensity of spir- 
itual aspiration, but just upon such a love for Jesus as 
will impel a man to take a leap into the dark, not 
because he knows there is solid ground at the bottom, 
but because he is fascinated and can do not other; his 
impulse is the instinct of love and consequences are lost 
sight of for the moment. What holds us back is a 
fear, very natural to men and women who live in a 
world which flaunts contradiction to the teaching of 
Jesus every day, lest after all He may have been wrong, 
and we should be left disillusioned and humiliated at 
the end; there is so unspeakably much at stake. In 
my last chapter I want to face up as well as I can to 
this obstinate fear, and to show how the whole of the 
great Sermon needs the supplement which only the 
Cross and the Resurrection can give. 


XXVI 
The Last Fear and the Way Through It 


IF we are to take the great risk and surrender our- 
selves to this inexorable demand, we have a right to 
stop and ask the question ““How can we be sure that 
Jesus was not Himself a mistaken idealist? Does not 
His claim sometimes seem almost insane in its extrava- 
gance?”’ He does not claim merely to be the perfect 
teacher of a new way of life, but to be Himself the sole 
foundation on which the life of man in time and eter- 
nity can be built without disaster. We begin His great 
pronouncement with blessings upon men and women 
who are distinguished by certain general virtues, we 
end it with everything else left in the background, 
faced with a supreme personal demand. He no longer 
says “If you are meek and merciful, if you are a peace- 
maker and pure in heart, you shall outlast the storms 
of time and be secure of the Kingdom,” but ‘He that 
heareth My words and doeth them shall be like a man 
whose house is built upon the rock.’’ What credentials 
has He and what has become of those who have made 
the venture with Him? We cannot afford to take 
refuge in generalities; so unspeakably much is at stake 
and at stake for us, in the answer. 

We may say first of all that at least He was always 


consistent, that He was not content with teaching us 
172 


The Last Fear and the Way Through It 173 


that the way of love and trust is the one secret alike of 
service to others and security for ourselves; He lived a 
life that never deviated from the path He marked out 
for us, He staked everything Himself upon the victory 
of sheer love. He taught us that force is no final rem- 
edy, that God is our Heavenly Father and will see the 
man who trusts Him through. He also taught us with 
equal insistency the essential goodness of human nature 
—though, as will appear later on, there is something 
more to be said on this point—at least that nothing can 
alter the fact that all men are God’s children and our 
brothers; but He also learnt what obedience must cost 
us “by the things that He suffered.’’ If we do not try 
to explain away the cry of despair on the Cross, we 
shall come to see that at any rate at the end He was left 
without any resources not available to us, except the 
power to love and suffer on in regions of experience 
where we cannot follow Him even in thought. When 
we are asked the question: “If as the Gospels declare, 
there were things which Jesus did not know and things 
He could not do, where does His divinity come in?’ 
the answer surely is in His love, for He emptied Him- 
self of all but love, and the love of God can never, by 
its very nature, let go. But are we to think of a high 
ideal breaking down under the stress of actual life? 
At any rate, we must face the facts. 

Could Jesus always trust men? If He could not, 
how can we? If it is true that men have only to be 
brought together as men, not as representing a certain 
point of view or as members of a party, that if they 
could only be simple and natural, all their differences 
might be settled, how is it that He was despised and 


174 The Realism of Jesus 


rejected by the mass of men? What is the use of our 
saying “Jf they would only be simple,” when the his- 
tory of all that has happened since His coming compels 
us to believe that for the great majority of those whom 
He came to win this condition never has been and never 
seems likely to be fulfilled? In the days of His flesh 
He did gather some few waifs and strays about Him, 
despised fishermen, outcast publicans, men and women 
who, for one reason or another, belonged to no group 
and represented no interests but their own; but what 
of the rest of humanity in that and every succeeding 
generation? Is He justified by the outcome or is 
Schweitzer right, when He suggests that Jesus made 
a divine miscalculation, but a miscalculation after all? 

We look back over the ground we have covered and 
can see here and there, even in the Sermon, that Jesus 
had faced these perpetually recurring questions, ques- 
tions which seem to challenge His whole view of God ~ 
and man. We remember that sudden plunge into 
gloom “If the light that is in you be darkness’”—as it 
is, so that after all Jesus does teach something like the 
actual depravity of the heart of man—“‘how great the 
‘darkness will be!” “If you, being evil”; He assumes: 
the evil in our dispositions without argument. Out of 
the mind of man darkened by suspicion and prejudice 
come not only all the crimes and scandals that disgrace 
the life of the world, but also all the uncertainty and 
disunion that paralyse the work of His Church. Jesus 
was never, at any stage of His ministry, a sentimental 
dreamer. 

He spoke also, and with increasing frequency and 
emphasis as His own dark hour drew near, of a ‘‘dark- 


/ 


The Last Fear and the Way Through It 175 


ness outside.” The “inner darkness’ of the Sermon 
becomes, unless the light of trust in God and man some- 
how breaks in, sooner or later an “outer darkness.” 
By the “outer darkness” He meant no removed place 
of punishment, but the inevitable reproduction in his 
environment of the darkness in a man’s own soul. The 
horrors and abominations of wartime were an inner 
darkness first in the minds of the war-lords and their 
peoples, before they wrought themselves out in. the 
devastated areas, but none of us realised how far the 
corruption had gone until it expressed itself in the ruin 
and misery of Europe. The selfish man by and by 
makes a wilderness about him; only then does he per- 
ceive that he is in the outer darkness; but he is only 
reproducing, as all men must, the truth of himself in 
his surroundings. Hell itself is but a condition of the 
soul, only realised when it begins to be reflected back 
from the life a man has made for himself. Jesus was 
an unflinching moral realist, and has made it unmis- 
takably plain that for the man who cannot trust anyone 
else there can be no place but the darkness outside. 
The fellowship must be very patient with him, but in 
the last resort it must protect itself against the con- 
tagion of distrust. The power of excommunication is 
in set terms given to His apostles, as it was exercised 
by the Lord Himself. Judas had to go out into the 
night to his own place, because while he was at the 
table fellowship was impossible; for the sake of the 
others he is dismissed. 

Are we left then with a little circle of light and a 
great outer ring of darkness? Did Jesus give the 
world up? If He did, if the darkness in the soul dis- 


176 The Realism of Jesus 


qualifies us for any permanent place in the company of 
Jesus and His friends, what hope is there for any of 
us? We do not need telling that jealousy, greed, and 
suspicion are the deadliest of all sins, for we know they 
killed the Lord of glory; we know also that, if we sur- 
render to them, we are not fit for any fellowship of 
which Jesus and His little ones are members; yet 
scarcely one of us in a thousand can really look out 
upon the world with the unclouded eyes of a little child. 
Is the Sermon, is Christianity, meant only for people 
with specially beautiful and unspoilt souls? 

To this question at least Jesus Himself offers an 
answer. The men who thronged to the King’s wed- 
ding-feast were a motley crowd of undesirables; the 
fact that in the phrase “both bad and good” the bad 
come first suggests that they were in the majority. 
The only one to be turned out was the man without the 
wedding-garment who disliked his fellow-guests more 
than he loved the King. The great Sermon preaches 
to us the loftiest of all ideals, but the foundation of 
the house of life which is built before our eyes is not 
first of all trust in God or man, an ideal to which most 
of us are not yet equal, but love for One who has taken 
the risk of trusting us first, a love of which every man, 
so long as he remains a man, is at least capable. We 
have seen that before we can say “Get right with God” 
we ought to say “Get right, if you can, with men; if 
you have made an honest attempt to live on the right 
human terms with your brother, God will not be slow 
in coming to terms with you.” But the Gospel goes 
further back; its essential message is “Get right with 
Jesus, and your love for Him will make you brave and 


The Last Fear and the Way Through It 177 


simple enough to get right with men.” Jesus whom 
we are to love and trust is not simply the Teacher who 
bade us believe in our Father, each other, and our- 
selves. He is our Elder Brother, and has gone our 
way before us. He not only brought the light; He 
carried it into and through the actual darkness. 

There was a time when His faith in men was 
clouded; if we cannot pray as we should without trust 
in the people in whose company we pray, neither could 
He, when His human environment had gone all awry. 
Still, though He knew us unworthy of His trust, He 
hoped against hope, for His doomed country, for 
Judas; if He did not, why make that last appeal to 
the city at the Triumphal Entry, why wash the feet of 
the traitor and share the sop with him? The cursing 
of the fig-tree, His weeping over Jerusalem, the tragic 
dismissal of Judas, tell us how hope died in the Sav- 
iour’s heart. In Gethsemane He longed for home, for 
the sure hold upon His Father which had always been 
His, but He drank the cup unflinchingly when the time 
came, though He knew what it was costing Him. In 
his very beautiful manual on “The Meaning of the 
Cross” (Epworth Press) Rev. W. R. Maltby tells the 
story of a working man in the North of England whose 
wife, soon after her marriage, drifted into vicious 
ways, and went rapidly from bad to worse. He came 
home one Sunday evening to find, as he had done a 
dozen times before, that she had gone on a new 
debauch. He knew in what condition she would return, 
after two or three days of a nameless life. He sat 
down in the cheerless house to look the truth in the 
face and to find out what he must do. The worst had 


178 The Realism of Jesus 


happened too often to leave him with much hope, and 
he saw in part what in store for him. Now that a new 
and terrible meaning had passed into the words “For 
better, for worse,” he reaffirmed his marriage vow. 
Later, when someone who knew them both intimately 
ventured to commiserate him, he answered, “Not a 
word! She is my wife and I shall love her as long as 
there is breath in my body.” She did not mend and 
died in his house after some years, in a shameful con- 
dition, with his hands spread over her in pity and 
prayer. 

We could scarcely find a more moving example of 
perfect human love; but the love of Jesus went further 
than this. Let us suppose, for the sake of illustration, 
that there were children of this tragic marriage, so that 
the mother could not be taken home as she was. The 
husband left them, let us say, in the charge of a rela- 
tive, and followed the prodigal until he found her. 
He could not induce her to come home; she only 
wanted to be left alone, she said. So he stayed with 
her, though he could not live the life she was living or 
breathe the air she breathed. He could be of no use 
to her, for his presence only exasperated her, until the 
time came when he could not pray but only feel. Even 
then his love would come short of that of Jesus, for 
the love of Jesus was God’s love just because the bar- 
rier which in the last resort prevents any one of us 
quite putting himself in his brother’s place was not 
there in His case. Those of us who have known what 
it was to sit by the bedside of the one we love best and 
wait for the “turn,” to try to feel and pray while the 
hours dragged themselves along, know something of 


The Last Fear and the Way Through It 179 


the love of God, but we do not know all, for though 
we would have given anything to go down into what- 
ever strange border-region the beloved is passing 
through, we know that we cannot ; we cannot get out- 
side ourselves; there are stages on the journey where 
no human companion can go with us. Jesus did; when 
the Good Shepherd found the lost sheep, He “put it on 
Fis shoulders.’ There is truth in the suggestion that 
when He cried “My God, My God, why hast Thou for- 
saken Me,’ He was most truly God, because He was 
most truly one with lost humanity. 

Perhaps the best shot at the meaning of the Atone- 
ment that has ever been made since the New Testament 
was written can be found in the children’s hymn: 

“He knew how wicked man had been, 
He knew that God must punish sin; 
So, out of pity, Jesus said, 

He’d bear the punishment instead.” 

But can we say punishment? Would not “conse- 
quences” be better? No; for it was not only a ques- 
tion of holding on to the individual sinner; we must 
be redeemed as a race, or not at all, for we are all 
bound up together; the worst thing about sin is that 
someone else beside the sinner suffers first and most 
by it. Before the Cross Jesus was able to save individ- 
ual men and women; since then He has not only been 
doing that, but redeeming the race. Whether we can 
any longer attach any definite meaning to such an 
abstract phrase as the “moral law” or not, the Cross 
must express the wrath of God against sin as well as 
His love for the sinner; the blood of Jesus must cry 
out more loudly than that of Abel against murder and 


180 The Realism of Jesus 


all that makes for murder. We may, if we will, say 
that God first made clear to us in the Old Testament 
what sin did with ourselves and each other, and, when 
that did not avail, what it was doing with Him, in the 
New; that the Cross is His supreme protest, His ver- 
dict upon the sin of man. But it is more; not only 
does Jesus sum up in Himself all the wasted good of 
the world, the innocent blood shed the world over from 
the time when man first learnt to be jealous of his 
brother, but He proves that the good is never wasted, 
if only the one sinned against can love enough. God 
and man are one in ideal, or Jesus could never have 
come in human flesh and blood. But they are drifting 
further apart every day; with man as he is, it is not 
enough to say “Come home” or even to persuade him 
to come by the promise of a welcome; in the first place 
home would not be to his taste, and, in the second, it 
would be home no longer if all comers were admitted 
without more ado; that would simply be bringing the 
darkness into the light. 

In face of this tragic impasse, there is nothing to 
set except Jesus. Christian thinkers could only explain 
what they found in Him by saying that the universe 
had been built about Him, that He is the secret, the 
ultimate essence of humanity. Nothing—no conceiv- _ 
able sin or doom—could ever make us anything but 
His brothers. This Jesus knew from the beginning; 
what He did discover was what it was going to cost 
Him to be indeed our Brother. We may say rever- 
ently that He staked everything upon the truth of His 
own consciousness, that in His person God and man 
were one, though the time came when they seemed to 


The Last Fear and the Way Through It 181 


be one in no other way. There was a time when He 
felt Himself forsaken with a lost world; but the dark 
hour passed, for love found out a way when trust and 
hope were gone. He never refused to face the facts 
which point to heartbreak and despair ; His eyes were 
always wide open, nor was His fear for us or for Him- 
self the sudden tremor which visits us in moments of 
depression; it sprang from a knowledge of the power 
of “the evil one in the world” which no one else has 
been brave or pure enough to share. He gives us dark 
hints and bids us be afraid too. He died, not because 
He was disappointed, or half in love with easeful 
death, but because to go on loving us, being what we 
proved ourselves at the Cross, meant the eclipse of the 
peace which had sustained Him in His life with us so 
far. Then suddenly fear leapt to His heart, for He 
knew now that the doom which He was afraid of for 
us was shadowing Him also. He conquered just 
because being what He was, He loved as far as love 
can go. By His victory a redeeming power has been 
set free in the life of men, which is a world-force like 
sin, but is stronger, because it has not merely like sin, 
the solidarity of the human race behind it, but the all- 
penetrating power of the love of God. There is no 
man in any world where men can be whom it cannot 
reach; there is no thread in any part of the tangle of 
human relationships into which it cannot find its way. 
‘Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound” ; 
as sin meets us at every turn, so does the grace of God 
in Christ, the one as inexorable in its unescapable 
demand as the other is relentless in its unescapable con- 
sequences; but it is stronger than sin, because it has 


182 The Realism of Jesus 


taken possession of the worst thing that sin has ever 
done, or can ever do, the murder of Jesus, and made it 
for all time the symbol of its redeeming power. “‘As 
Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must 
the Son of Man be lifted up, that everyone who believes 
in Him may have the life that knows no death.” 

If Jesus, the light, made Himself one with a world 
forsaken in a darkness of its own making, the darkness 
is passed, for the light has gone down into whatever 
depths there are, and has not been overcome. If He 
can reach lost souls, there can be no soul of man hope- 
lessly lost; if He has thrown Himself in with the for- 
tunes of a forsaken world, the world is not forsaken. 
He cannot at least be less than God, for, if He is not 
divine, there is something greater than God in life. 
Now we can give ourselves away with both hands all 
the time without the last fear which might, but for the 
Cross, hold us back, the fear lest we should sink our- 
selves, lest our faith should fail us. He has been our 
way before, and has found bottom for us; we need 
not fear the risk of despair, for there is one thing at 
least in the world beside high hope and bitter disap- 
pointment; there is the God revealed in Jesus, who has 
inspired us with the one and will support us through 
the other, “the Author and Perfecter of our Faith.” 
If we lose all else, at least we have Him, and with Him 
we can learn to trust the untrustworthy, even ourselves, 
for His sake, who “has raised our human nature to 
the clouds at God’s right hand,”’ Simple love for this 
Jesus, the casting of all our doubts and fears, of alt 
the fortunes of our high endeavour, upon Him, brings 
back the child-heart, and with the child-heart, the life 
described in the great Sermon becomes at last possible. 


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